How to Turn On (and Off) ChatGPT’s Newly Available Memory Feature

In a win for chatbot nerds, OpenAI’s new memory feature it teased in February is officially available to all ChatGPT Plus users, (as long as they don’t live in Europe or Korea).

The feature lets ChatGPT remember and utilize personalized information shared during conversations, giving the AI chatbot the ability to improve and become more useful over time. The capability is currently the only one of its kind too, giving ChatGPT a leg up over other chatbot competitors like Gemini and Microsoft Copilot.

The AI research lab has given users the option to forget specific interactions too, giving them full control of how the feature works. So, whether you’re excited to use this feature, fear its implications on your privacy, or are somewhere in between, this guide breaks down how you can leverage ChatGPT’s new memory tool, make the chatbot remember selectively, or opt out of the feature altogether.

What Is ChatGPT’s Memory Feature?

In February, AI developer OpenAI announced it was testing a unique feature that enabled ChatGPT to remember conversations to make future chats more useful. But how exactly does this work?

As you chat with ChatGPT, you’ll be able to ask it to remember a specific detail of a conversation or let it pick up the details itself, OpenAI explained in a blog post. This will result in subtle improvements over time and will make the chatbot more capable of delivering responses that are personal to you.

For example, if you’ve previously told ChatGPT you prefer meeting notes to have headlines and bullet points, all meeting recaps will be delivered using this format in the future. Or, if you have a toddler who loves jellyfish, ChatGPT will remember this detail when you ask it to create a card for them for their birthday

Source: OpenAI

Based on feedback from OpenAI’s testing, ChatGPT will also tell users when memories have been updated. Users also have complete control over what ChatGPT remembers and are able to make the chatbot “forget” certain details from conversations. To do so, you simply need to hover over “Memory updated” before reviewing the controls under “Manage memories”.

How Can I Use ChatGPT’s New Memory Feature?

Since OpenAI has extended this capability to all Plus users outside of Korea and Europe, it’s the perfect time to test it out for yourself. If you’re not a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, that is, paying for the premium service, you’ll need to do that first.

Getting started with the feature is easy, all you need to do is follow the simple steps below:

1. Open ChatGPT
2. Open “Settings”
3. Select “Personalization”
4. Toggle the “Memory” option by moving the slider to the left

Voilà, ChatGPT’s memory feature will now be activated. Now all you need to do is use ChatGPT as you would normally and see the results for yourselves. If there are certain things you’d like to be forgotten from your conversation thread, you simply tell ChatGPT “I would like you to forget this”. You can also delete certain interactions by following the steps below:

1. Open ChatGPT
2. Open “Settings”
3. Select “Personalization”
4. Select “Manage Memory”
5. Choose which interactions you’d like ChatGPT to forget 

ChatGPT Memory Sounds Creepy, Can I Opt Out?

While ChatGPT’s new memory feature represents a breakthrough in the technology and gives OpenAI’s chatbot another competitive advantage over competitors like Gemini and Claude, it won’t be welcomed with open arms by users who are already skeptical about the tool’s data collection practices.

It’s no secret that OpenAI trains ChatGPT by scraping data from various sources on the internet. However, this controversial method has resulted in OpenAI being the subject of numerous lawsuits accusing the research lab of taking information from hundreds of millions of internet users without their consent.

While the chatbot maker has made it very clear that memorized user input won’t be fed back into the system as training data, OpenAI’s track record is enough to ruffle the feathers of privacy advocates and regular users alike. So if the chatbot’s new conversational capability gives you the chills, you can learn how to turn off ChatGPT’s memory feature here.