ChatGPT Memory Intro

Timothy Chester

Recently, I resumed work on a project from months ago and turned to ChatGPT for help analyzing documents. Expecting to start fresh, I was stunned when ChatGPT asked, “Do you want to pick up where we left off in November?”—even though I had deleted that conversation. When I asked it to summarize our past discussion, it produced a detailed response, despite my chat history being erased. This raised a bigger question: What does GenAI really remember, even after we delete our interactions? And if GenAI tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini retain context beyond a session, are they quietly building a “digital twin” of us? In today’s Dispatch, we explore what AI knows, what we don’t know about its memory, and why the real concern shouldn’t be Artificial General Intelligence but what GenAI already remembers about us today.