Be wary of chatbots that know and remember you intimately
OpenAI is rolling out what it calls a memory feature in ChatGPT. The popular chatbot that uses artificial intelligence (AI) will be able to store key details about its users to make answers more personalized and “more helpful," according to OpenAI. These can be facts about your family or health, or preferences about how you want ChatGPT to talk to you, so that instead of starting on a blank page, it’s armed with useful context.
As with so many tech innovations, what sounds cutting-edge and useful also has a dark flip-side: It could blast another hole into our digital privacy and—just maybe—push us further into the echo chambers that social media forged. AI firms have been chasing new ways of increasing chatbot ‘memory’ for years to make their bots more useful. They’re also following a roadmap that worked for Facebook, gleaning personal information to better target users with content to keep them scrolling.
OpenAI’s new feature—which is rolling out to both paying subscribers and free users—could also engage its customers better, which would benefit the business. At the moment, ChatGPT’s users spend an average of seven-and-a-half minutes per visit on the service, according to market research firm SimilarWeb. That makes it one of the stickiest AI services available, but the metric could go higher.
Time spent on YouTube, for instance, is 20 minutes for each visit. By processing and retaining more private information, OpenAI could boost those stickiness numbers and stay ahead of competing chatbots from Microsoft, Anthropic and Perplexity. But there are worrying side effects.
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