The model is frozen, it knows nothing about you. Then you open ChatGPT and it greets you by name, knows what you work on, remembers how you write. A contradiction?
No. It’s the most elegant trick in the whole architecture.
Memory.
At the beach the explanation goes like this: it remembers me, so it knows me. It has my profile in its head.
But the model is still that photograph described in the previous article: it meets you for the first time, every time. The memory isn’t inside it. It lives outside, in an archive kept by the tool you’re using — whether that’s ChatGPT or Claude. It’s a file about you. And just before each of your questions, someone pastes it back in.
Imagine a forgetful genius and an assistant who, just before every meeting, whispers to him: “this is Marco, he works in software, he writes like this.” The genius seems to recognise you. He doesn’t. He just read a note.
Remembering and re-reading are not the same thing. He re-reads.
Convenient: you stop having to re-introduce yourself at every chat. But that file grows, the provider keeps it, and it updates according to rules you don’t set. The same convenience that saves you effort is a dossier about you. And if a wrong detail gets in there, it quietly poisons every future answer — because you don’t see the note passing every time.
The good news: you can write the note yourself. Tell it once, clearly, the things that matter: who you are, what you do, how you want your answers. And the tool carries them forward. It’s an important part of the “prompt engineering” already discussed: you’re no longer designing the individual message, you’re designing the context that stays.
The takeaway: AI doesn’t remember you. Someone passes it your file every time. It’s worth being clear about who keeps it, what’s written on it — and writing on it yourself when it matters.
One detail remains that raises a suspicion. If someone slips my file back in just before every answer… aren’t they slipping other things in too? Things I didn’t put there?
Yes, they are. And what they slip in isn’t your choice.