What ChatGPT Thinks It Knows About You Is Affecting Its Answers. Here’s How to Change That
A memory of some kind is now a standard feature for an AI chatbot. The chatbot stores all of your interactions in its memory, enabling you to refer back to previous conversations, and giving the tool some useful context to frame its answers with. For example, if you tell it you’re vegetarian, it won’t recommend recipes with meat in them.
This comes with privacy considerations as more of us share more of our lives with these apps. But it also has the potential to affect the responses you get from the AI in ways that you don’t necessarily want.
Perhaps you’ve spent a week researching how to replace a light switch and ChatGPT thinks you’re a DIY enthusiast. Or you’ve been looking up places around a certain location that you’re heading to for vacation, and the AI thinks you live there. All the bot’s answers come with memory context now. Here’s how it works, and what you can do about it.
How ChatGPT Memory Works
When ChatGPT first introduced a memory feature back in April 2024, you had to be very specific about what you wanted it to remember: You had to explicitly say to the bot “remember this” about something, otherwise it would be lost in the flow of conversation. You could then refer back to it as needed.
It was a start, but not a very good one. These memories were very fixed—so if you mentioned an upcoming party, ChatGPT would always assume it was still in the future, even after the date had passed. Until you told the AI bot otherwise, it would always be referring to an upcoming event.
After an update in June, ChatGPT now does something called dreaming, as explained on the OpenAI blog. Memories are now flexible, and are now built up and edited over time—so ChatGPT knows the party is in the past, not the future. What’s more, memories are saved and sifted through automatically, so you don’t have to make manual requests any more.
Essentially, it’s now down to the chatbot rather than you to decide what’s important enough to be remembered—and while that’s certainly more convenient for users, it can come with its own problems. ChatGPT is continually refining what it thinks it knows about you every time you interact with it, and it won’t always make the right assessments.
OpenAI says the three main aims of memory (or dreaming) are to carry forward useful context, to follow preferences and constraints, and to stay current over time. Ideally, that should mean responses that are tuned and personalized in helpful ways, but you don’t get as much control over this as you might expect.
You Can Edit ChatGPT’s Memory
To find out what ChatGPT has remembered about you in the web app, click your profile icon (bottom left), then choose Personalization and scroll down to the Memory section. In the mobile apps, tap the menu button (top left), then your profile icon, then Memory.
The first thing you’ll see is a toggle switch for enabling the memory feature. You can turn this off to stop ChatGPT from remembering anything you say, but this won’t wipe out existing memories—the AI won’t refer to them, but it will hang on to them in case you decide to use memory again.
Choose Manage next to Memory summaries to take a closer look at the AI’s profile of you. This will cover topics like your interests and how you prefer answers to be delivered: You can highlight anything here, and then choose Make a correction or Don’t mention this again to make changes. You can also use the prompt box at the bottom to issue commands like “forget that I’m a journalist.”
To wipe everything, select the three dots at the top, then choose Delete and turn off memory. Once you’ve confirmed your choice, you and ChatGPT will be starting again from scratch, memory-wise—although your past conversations don’t go anywhere, and if you turn memory back on, these chats will be indexed all over again as ChatGPT tries to figure out who you are.
Of course another way to manage memory is to not tell ChatGPT anything you don’t want remembered. There’s also a temporary chat feature available: Nothing in temporary chats is committed to memory, and they’re forgotten as soon as they’re closed. On the web, click the dotted speech bubble (top right) to start a temporary chat.