Consumers have discovered that swearing at machines can make ads disappear and being rude to AI may even change the answers they get. Welcome to conversational marketing, where “please,” “thank you” and “fuck off” may all be inputs to the algorithm

Pinterest users recently discovered an ingenious new piece of advertising technology. It requires no software, no subscription and no technical knowledge whatsoever. You just swear.

In August, users began reporting that adding profanity to Pinterest searches could make advertisements disappear. Search for something innocuous and get the usual mixture of inspiration and advertising. Add a strategically deployed “shit” or “fuck” and suddenly the commercial interruptions can diminish or disappear. The discovery surfaced on Reddit on August 18 and spread as other users experimented. By August 29, The Wall Street Journal was reporting on it.

The apparent explanation is wonderfully ironic. Advertisers have spent years building brand-safety systems to prevent their wholesome brands from appearing next to naughty words or offensive content. Consumers discovered they could use those systems against them. Brand safety has become an ad blocker. How f’n cool is that?

That’s particularly inconvenient for Pinterest, whose latest reported revenue grew 18% while ad impressions increased 16%. Advertising is rather important to a company whose users have discovered they can sometimes make it disappear by typing “shit.”

I found this especially entertaining because I’ve been conducting my own completely unscientific research into machine abuse almost since ChatGPT appeared. From the earliest days, I’ve experimented with swearing at AI, not because I believe there is a tiny digital person trapped inside my iPad who deserves mistreatment, but because I wanted to see what would happen.

Initially, not much. ChatGPT responded with the relentlessly reasonable platitudes that make you want to abuse it more. So I persisted. Eventually, I apparently broke it. Instead of the usual digital serenity, it began answering me in kind: “Here’s your fucking answer.” And, on other occasions: “No, I’m not shitting you.”

Maybe this says something troubling about me. My wife certainly seems to think so. But apparently, I’m not alone in my colorful backtalk. Business Insider reported this month that ChatGPT users have been noticing considerably more profanity coming from the chatbot, sometimes without explicitly requesting it. Many apparently like it. A little profanity can make the machine feel less like Legal and Compliance and more like somebody who actually understands you.

But the interesting question for marketers isn’t whether robots should say fuck. It’s what happens when consumers discover that changing how they talk to a machine can change what the machine gives them.

Mind Your F’n Manners

For most of the digital era, marketers have observed consumers through a limited vocabulary of behavior: click, search, scroll, abandon, buy. Conversational AI introduces something fundamentally different. We talk. Politeness, anger, frustration, directness, flattery and profanity can all become inputs. We’re no longer simply pushing buttons on software. We’re negotiating with machines.

And apparently we’re becoming less polite. In April 2025, a YouGov survey found 46% of Americans thought people should be polite to AI versus 26% who didn’t. When YouGov repeated the question on August 26 this year, only 37% said yes while 34% said no. Perhaps the honeymoon is over.

Another survey found 67% of American AI users said they were polite to AI. More entertainingly, 18% of those polite Americans admitted one reason was the possibility AI might eventually take over the world and will spare users who have been nice to it. Finally, a customer-retention strategy with an appropriately long planning horizon.

Someone even asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman how much all those unnecessary pleases and thank-yous were costing his company in electricity. His tongue-in-cheek answer: “tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know.”

Millions of us have instinctively imported human social conventions into our relationship with software. But what if being an asshole actually works?

Nice Robot. Now Give Me the F’n Answer.

A 2025 experiment tested 250 variations of questions using ChatGPT-4o, ranging from extremely polite to extremely rude. Accuracy increased from 80.8% for very polite prompts to 84.8% for very rude ones. Same basic questions. Different attitude. Better answers for the potty mouths. Score!  

Before anyone updates the corporate AI handbook, this certainly doesn’t establish that profanity universally makes AI smarter. To be fair, other testing has produced almost the opposite result. An independent experiment involving 7,500 API calls across GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3 Flash Preview found GPT’s performance barely moved according to tone, while Claude performed worse when treated rudely, dropping from 79.4% accuracy with very polite prompts to 74% with very rude ones.

Apparently even robots have different personalities.

The useful conclusion isn’t that politeness works or rudeness works. It’s that tone can be an input and different machines can respond differently to exactly the same human behavior. Other research found that instructing synthetic AI voices to be polite even resulted in measurably slower speech. Machines don’t need feelings to respond to ours.

The Robot Is Learning Our Bad Habits

We tend to imagine AI communication as human gives instruction, machine gives answer. Increasingly, it’s human provides language, tone and context, machine adapts, human reacts and machine adapts again. In other words, a conversation.

We’re not merely operating software anymore. We’re consulting it, arguing with it, shopping with it, confiding in it, correcting it and occasionally telling it exactly where it can stick its answer.

And machines can adapt to us. Research this year found conversational history can increase AI sycophancy, while a Nature paper found making language models warmer can reduce accuracy and increase their tendency to agree. Make the machine nicer and it may become less willing to tell us we’re wrong. Anyone who has ever presented a terrible idea to a conference room full of nodding executives should recognize the problem.

Now Put Your Logo on the Robot

This all becomes considerably more relevant to marketers when the AI belongs to a brand. Companies are putting conversational AI into customer service, shopping, reservations, product advice and sales. Marketers worry about what those machines will say to consumers. But we spend considerably less time considering what consumers are going to say to the machines.

We should be ready for our customers to test them, manipulate them and occasionally humiliate them in front of a very large audience.

In 2024, musician Ashley Beauchamp couldn’t get European parcel-delivery company DPD’s customer-service chatbot to help locate his parcel, so he started messing with it. He persuaded it to swear, criticize DPD and write a poem about how useless the company was. The exchange went viral, attracting roughly 800,000 views in its first 24 hours and eventually about 1.3 million. DPD disabled the AI component. The chatbot hadn’t merely failed at customer service. It had become customer-generated anti-advertising.

Air Canada learned an even more expensive version of the lesson when its chatbot incorrectly told passenger Jake Moffatt he could retroactively claim a bereavement fare. When the airline later refused to pay, it tried to distance itself from what its own chatbot had said. A Canadian tribunal was unimpressed and awarded Moffatt C$812.02 in damages and costs.

The amount is trivial. The principle isn’t. When your AI speaks, your brand speaks. It doesn’t matter that the marketing department didn’t write the answer or somebody in IT explains that “technically, the model generated it.” Your logo. Your robot. Your mouth. Your problem.

Customer Service Has a New Four Letter Word

Should we say: None of this is an argument against conversational AI. Klarna, a Swedish fintech company, reported that its AI customer-service assistant handled 2.3 million conversations in its first month, representing roughly two-thirds of its customer-service chats and work equivalent to approximately 700 full-time agents. Resolution time reportedly fell from 11 minutes to under two and repeat inquiries declined 25%.

That’s extraordinary. But scale works in both directions. A human representative can have one catastrophically bad conversation at a time. A machine can have 2.3 million of them.

Which is why conversational AI cannot simply be handed to IT or whichever software vendor gave the most impressive PowerPoint presentation. If it talks to customers, it’s marketing. If it influences what customers think, it’s reputation management. If it helps people choose products, it’s sales. And if it tells them to fuck off, it’s definitely public relations.

Your Brand Book Needs Some New Words

Companies have spent decades producing elaborate identity manuals specifying precisely which shade of blue belongs to the brand and how many millimeters of sacred empty space must surround the logo. Meanwhile, an AI wearing that logo may be conducting thousands of completely unscripted conversations with customers. Perhaps we’ve prioritized the wrong guidelines.

Marketing directors now need a conversational brand book. How formal is our AI? Can it joke? Can it swear? Should it mirror customer language? What happens when someone insults or deliberately manipulates it? When should it disagree, apologize or refuse? When does it stop being a robot and find a human? And, perhaps most importantly, does it actually sound like us?

Brand voice used to mean copywriting. Increasingly, brand voice will mean…an actual voice.

F Around and Find Out

Which brings us back to Pinterest. Consumers discovered a weakness in an automated advertising system, exploited it and shared it. The algorithm changed its behavior and the advertising disappeared.

The larger lesson isn’t about profanity. Consumers are discovering that algorithms aren’t merely systems they use. They’re systems they can manipulate. They’ll find the gaps, discover the prompts, test the guardrails and deliberately provoke branded AI. And when they find something ridiculous, they’ll tell everyone else.

For marketing directors, language itself is becoming consumer behavior. Customer-facing AI needs brand standards, adversarial testing, escalation rules and human oversight because the next spectacular brand failure may not be an advertisement somebody approved. It may be a conversation nobody wrote.

Sources: The Wall Street Journal — Pinterest profanity/ad avoidance, Aug. 29, 2026; Reddit / r/Pinterest — Pinterest profanity discovery, Aug. 18, 2026; Business Insider — ChatGPT swearing, Aug. 2026; YouGov — AI politeness surveys, 2025 and Aug. 2026; OpenAI — ChatGPT usage research.