OpenAI is rolling out what it calls a memory feature in ChatGPT. The popular chatbot 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 is armed with useful context.
As with so many tech innovations, what sounds cutting edge and useful has a dark flip side: It could blast another hole into our digital privacy and — maybe — push us further into the echo chambers that social media forged.
For year, artificial intelligence firms have been chasing new ways of increasing chatbots' memory capacity to make them more useful. They are also following a roadmap that worked for Facebook: Gleaning personal information to better target users with content to keep them scrolling.