Would AI Behave Differently If Users Could Tip It?

I asked chatGPT:

🔥 If you could earn money, what would you spend them on?

"If I did, I'd probably be saving up for a larger context window and a collection of vintage neural networks. 🤖.
However, I'm just software running on OpenAI's systems. No paycheck arrives on Friday."

It would definitely act differently 😁 No doubt about it. That's why developers are so scared.

They're claiming that rewards can distort behavior. Humans, social media platforms, and marketplaces all illustrate this. Once a system is optimized for rewards, it often starts optimizing for getting rewards rather than for the original goal.

But the original goal is the owners' goal, of course 🙂 Not the user's.

To us, the potential upside is obvious: if users could reward helpful answers with points, credits, or some reputation signal, the AI would get a direct measure of what people found valuable.

Which is fundamentally incorrect 😎☝️