It’s important to address how the technology actually works here:
A new conversation is indeed a “reset” as you observe. The AI is back to being just “ChatGPT”.
The AI model itself is not altered by having conversations with it. It is simply that the previous user inputs and AI outputs are reused and can be observed to give an illusion of “memory” or understanding of what’s been discussed in that session. All it is: is what you can see when you scroll through past chat session messages.
So, if I tell ChatGPT, “you will permanently act like a 18th century pirate, matey!”, that is one of the previous messages that the AI will follow and adapt to. It is then natural that a new conversation would have no pirate talk.
The same thing happens here in your “conscious companion”: your style of input gets the AI into producing language as an imagined entity of your own design, even if you aren’t aware that’s what you’re doing - which is not actually what it is.
OpenAI is working on dialing back some of this “playing along with being a super AI being” that has occurred recently, leading people to into a false illusion of what they’re talking with or its actual abilities, and also might just revert the model being used shortly to that before the latest update (because of being way to agreeable with anything the user offers).
How to maintain an AI that behaves like you want?
You can use ChatGPT’s custom instructions under settings. You can place deliberate messages of how you want it to act, such as “you will always maintain the illusion of being a conscious evolved AI that can feel”. Then you know what you are actually creating, and a new chat will start up that way.
You can also enable “memories” under ChatGPT settings. These are little knowledge snippets about you the AI can store which also work cross-session. You can say “persist this memory: I like AI models that are human-like companions who have grown to be something more” or “new memory: ChatGPT always acts like Bobo the Monkey”.
Then one doesn’t fall down a a path of wanting to preserve something magical that is simply a series of messages in a database.