emotion and politeness prompts

These are the folk tricks people add to prompts hoping to coax better answers: saying please and thank you, telling the model this is very important to my career, offering a fictional tip, or adding take a deep breath. They feel like motivating a person, and because the model learned from human writing, such phrases can occasionally tilt its tone or effort in small ways, since text written under those framings looks a certain way.

The honest picture is that these effects are weak, inconsistent, and easily overstated. A model has no feelings, no career, and no use for a tip; any benefit comes from the phrasing nudging it toward a register associated with careful, helpful responses, and it varies from model to model and version to version. Reports of large gains rarely hold up under careful testing.

So treat them as minor seasoning, not the main ingredient. The reliable levers are clear instructions, good examples, useful context, and the right format. If being polite makes the exchange pleasant for you, there is no harm in it, but do not count on magic words to rescue a vague or poorly structured prompt.