Your Chatbot’s Memory of You Can Shape the Information You See

Tech companies say that LLMs work better if they remember things about you. But people may find themselves “insulated from the truth by the very tools they use to seek it.”

AI companies are pouring energy into tools that they say don’t just answer questions, but remember things about their users through chat conversations, search histories, social media feeds, code bases, and any other data. That’s all advertised as being helpful. “The more you use it, the more useful it becomes,” OpenAI says, while Google’s Gemini assures people that it “understands you.” But what do we really know about what chatbots remember and how those memories affect what people see?

A few recent papers test how chatbots’ personalization features—such as memory—work. They give us a glimpse, for the first time in a systematic way, of how these features shape the information we receive. That’s important, because the main reason people use AI is for information-seeking. Researchers found, too, that users have less control than tech companies have promised over what information gets stored about them.