Sometimes AI remembers the wrong me
Simon Willison has some thoughts on ChatGPT's new memory dossier (title spoiler: he doesn't like it.) He's finding that his past queries are influencing new responses, which on the surface sounds like a feature, but...
"I try a lot of stupid things with these models. I really don’t want my fondness for dogs wearing pelican costumes to affect my future prompts where I’m trying to get actual work done!"
I too, try a lot of stupid things. As I mentioned before,
"I’ve been spending some time lately trying to get AI to do things that I’m not very good at personally. I don’t expect amazing outcomes and these aren’t high stakes activities (and that’s a good thing; more on that in a sec,) but while I don’t have enough free time to, say, write a book or create an animated film, these are fun things to imagine (the “when I retire” myth) and I have enough spare time to see if AI can do these things for me."
The trouble is, ChatGPT's memory feature can't seem to tell the difference between what I've actually done and what I've just daydreamed about (in fairness, humans have that problem too.)
In my experience, this has only been a problem when I try the various meme prompts like the CIA dossier but hey, maybe I'm just practicing good security by adding noise to the signal.
In a past life, I'd see this as a product problem that would best be solved by some kind of persona system, but wow, that'd be exhausting to maintain (are you really going to remember to swap between "work mode" and "goofball" mode mid-thread every time?)
I did like the old memory system where I could prune the list if it remembered things I didn't think were relevant, but I think the eventual outcome is that memory will get better at being relevant, and we'll also stop worrying about it as much. Real life interactions are going to be biased by past conversations too, and my weird questions when I'm bored are likely going to be weighted as just that over time.
Until then, a little bit of weirdness inspired by my personality is just going to make things more whimsical. Could be worse.
