I’m totally against the anthropomorphization of LLMs. These are tools, not sentient beings. Treat them as such. Unlike a power tool, they don’t need respect because they cannot hurt you. LLMs trying to simulate human behavior is like the equivalent of skeuomorphism in UI design.
That's the point of the study, though, whether using polite language makes the tool work better. It's similarly misguided to refuse to do so out of an anti-anthropomorphization stance, if it makes it respond more usefully.
These are still somewhat mysterious artifacts, that we don't really know how to use. But it's trained on human text, so it's plausible its workings are based on patterns in there.