With OpenAI’s memory upgrade, ChatGPT can recall everything you’ve ever shared with it, indefinitely. Similarly, Google has opened the context window with “Infini-attention,” letting large language models (LLMs) reference infinite inputs with zero memory loss. And in consumer-facing tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, this means persistent, personalized memory across conversations, unless you manually intervene.
The sales pitch is seductively simple: less friction, more relevance. Conversations that feel like continuity: “Systems that get to know you over your life,” as Sam Altman writes on X. Technology, finally, that meets you where you are.
In the age of hyper-personalization — of the TikTok For You page, Spotify Wrapped, and Netflix Your Next Watch — a conversational AI product that remembers everything about you feels perfectly, perhaps dangerously, natural.
Forgetting, then, begins to look like a flaw. A failure to retain. A bug in the code. Especially in our own lives, we treat memory loss as a tragedy, clinging to photo albums and cloud backups to preserve what time tries to erase.
But what if human forgetting is not a bug, but a feature? And what happens when we build machines that don’t forget, but are now helping shape the human minds that do?
I don’t hate this article, but I’d rather have read a blog post grounded in the author’s personal experience engaging with a personalized AI assistant. She clearly has her own opinions about how they should work, but instead of being about that there’s this attempt to make it sound like there’s a lot of objective certainty to it that falls flat because of failing to draw a strong connection.
Like this part:
Research in cognitive and developmental psychology shows that stepping outside one’s comfort zone is essential for growth, resilience, and adaptation. Yet, infinite-memory LLM systems, much like personalization algorithms, are engineered explicitly for comfort. They wrap users in a cocoon of sameness by continuously repeating familiar conversational patterns, reinforcing existing user preferences and biases, and avoiding content or ideas that might challenge or discomfort the user.
While this engineered comfort may boost short-term satisfaction, its long-term effects are troubling. It replaces the discomfort necessary for cognitive growth with repetitive familiarity, effectively transforming your cognitive gym into a lazy river. Rather than stretching cognitive and emotional capacities, infinite-memory systems risk stagnating them, creating a psychological landscape devoid of intellectual curiosity and resilience.
So, how do we break free from this? If the risks of infinite memory are clear, the path forward must be just as intentional.
Some hard evidence that stepping out of your comfort zone is good, but not really any that preventing stepping out of their comfort zone is in practice the effect that “infinite memory” features of personal AI assistants has on people, just rhetorical speculation.
Which is a shame because how that affects people is pretty interesting to me. The idea of using a LLM with these features always freaked me out and I quit using ChatGPT before they were implemented, but I want to know how it’s going for the people that didn’t, and who use it for stuff like the given example of picking a restaurant to eat at.
WalnutLum@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
“Infini-attention” isn’t perfect memory, it’s highly compressed representations of the entire history. (arxiv.org/html/2404.07143v1).
Much like quantization. The longer the context gets the worse the compression makes recall.