Why I Turned Off ChatGPT’s Memory

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Kathryn Felten 4 months ago

Game changer.

Over the past few weeks — maybe even the last month — I’ve felt a real shift in how ChatGPT responds. Things started to feel… mushy. Blended. Like context from one part of my life was bleeding into everything else.

During that same time, my mom passed. I’m processing grief, of course. But I’m also building some very big things. I use ChatGPT constantly throughout the day, across multiple rooms and contexts. Emotional processing, strategic work, creative architecture — very different modes.

What I realized reading this (honestly, just seeing the title) was that memory was flattening those modes together. It was remembering things I didn’t want foregrounded. Positioning me in narratives I wasn’t inhabiting in that moment.

Within minutes, I turned every memory setting off.

Maybe I’ll change my mind. It’s only been 20 minutes. But the relief was immediate.

I’m now much more interested in custom instructions and room-based behavioral context. Stance matters more to me than autobiographical continuity. I’d rather define how the system behaves in a space than have it infer who I am across time.

This came at exactly the right moment. Thank you for articulating something I didn’t fully have language for yet.

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