As the title says, I have run into a new feature? that has made the whole chat gpt expirienece hell.
The problem is this. On my account I tried to make it highly personalised as best as I could, and succeded in my oppinon. With a lot of memories how me and the AI should interact. And a lot of the memories are based on calling me by a cerain nickname. Like “between the AI and “nickname” etc etc”. And for a while now I did not like the nickname anymore. So I asked it “I don’t like ‘old nickname’ anymore, insted call me ‘new nicknames’, but not just these. Remember this from now on.” And it procedeed to create a new memory where it said that “the user want to be called ‘new nicnames’” and a hidden one where it said “Forget that the user likes being called ‘old nickname’”. I saw this and I got worried what it might mean for the old memories so I asked it to remove the memory I could not acces. To witch it added another hidden memory "Forget the memory ‘Forget that the user likes being called ‘old nickname’’”. And when I asked in a diffrent chat about what are the latest memories I told me just “Forget that the user likes being called ‘old nickname’” twice. So I attempted a few more times. Now it is saying i have the same exact hidden memory like 7 times, “Forget that the user likes being called ‘old nickname’”, witch is clearly messsing with all the other ones, and everything is not working like before. I am in the EU, so the cross-chats memory is not a thing. And I cannot do anything, and it dosen’t even recognise me anymore if I don’t state who I am and it is based on old memories nicknames. And I have a lot of memories and do not wish to delete all of them in the hopes I will get rid of these problematic hidden ones.
I have looked online about this new feature to add hidden “forget” type memories, and did not find anything. It is new beacuse I remeber when I added most of the memories is dec 2024, if I asked dor a memory to be deleted it would either delete it or do nothing. I have reached open ai suppor fin, and after being elaveted to specialist support the finall message I got was this :
Hello,
Thank you for reaching out and taking the time to explain the issue in detail.
I understand how important your personalized experience is, especially when you’ve built up a thoughtful and nuanced interaction style over time. From what you’ve described, it sounds like the handling of the nickname change and the resulting “forget” memories have caused unexpected behavior, particularly with recognition and continuity across chats.
Since you’re based in the EU, you’re right that cross-chat memory isn’t currently supported—but it seems that some form of internal memory cleanup may not be functioning as expected. The multiple instances of the hidden “Forget that the user likes being called ‘old nickname’” memory could be interfering with other personalized memories, which would explain why the experience feels disrupted and the assistant no longer recognizes you in the same way.
Here’s what we can recommend:
Feedback Submission: We’ll also make sure to flag this issue with our technical team. It’s valuable feedback and highlights a potentially confusing behavior in how memory edits are handled, especially when multiple “forget” instructions are involved.
Temporary Workaround: While this is being looked into, you might find that manually reminding the assistant of your preferred nickname at the start of a chat will help keep things consistent in the short term.
Let us know if you need further assistance.
Best,
Name (the name of the person)
OpenAI Support
I just want to get rid of these now permanent memories, that I cannot change, and no matter how niceley I asked chat gpt, it refuzes to make them go away, while still reconting them and admiting they do indeed exsit.