We’ve covered various AI topics plenty of times on this blog, but for good reason. New tools are constantly being produced and the existing ones are regularly developing new features to enhance the ways we can use them.
Today it’s ChatGPT’s turn in the spotlight.
AI drawbacks
If you’ve tested any of the AI tools floating around in the digital space, you’ve probably noticed that they aren’t always quite as useful to the average user as they’re made out to be. We definitely have.
It’s difficult to simply open an AI software for the first time, input a quick command and immediately receive the results that you’re after. Most of the AI tools work best when used by someone who understands them. Not necessarily someone who understands how the technology behind AI works (because, let’s be honest, it’s probably a relatively small percentage of the population who actually does understand the workings of AI), but someone who knows how to work with that particular tool.
You need to understand what to say and how to say it in order to get the best results. So much so, that people are making money off of teaching people how to leverage AI tools correctly. Not just in the form of training courses as you may have expected.
Take these listings that I found on Etsy, where people are selling packs of ChatGPT prompts as a digital download. You can type whatever you want into ChatGPT, but people are profiting from the fact that the AI responds best to certain phrasing, terminology and structure.
If you regularly use AI to support your work, learning the necessary prompts to streamline your experience can be invaluable. An annoyance is that you’ll need to remember these and input them most times that you use the tool, rather than just the first time you use it.
However, OpenAI’s latest announcement for ChatGPT may just solve this issue, or at least make it slightly less taxing.
Introducing memory to ChatGPT
Currently in its testing phase, ChatGPT Memory is a feature that enables the chatbot to remember aspects of past conversations to use in future ones. Although the AI already stores past conversations for you to return to at a later date, it doesn’t cross-reference these conversations with others.
The memory function will be manually controlled by the user, requiring you to prompt the chatbot to remember something that you’ve said. In the same way, you’ll be able to ask it to forget something that you’d previously got it to store.
OpenAI provided some examples of how this feature will work:
- If you use ChatGPT to generate meeting notes, you can tell the AI how you prefer to have these formatted. By prompting the chatbot to display meeting notes with headlines, bullets and action items summarised at the bottom, it will remember this and always recap meetings in this way.
- Suppose you’ve told ChatGPT what kind of business you own. When asking it to brainstorm messaging for a social media post, it’ll take the information about your business into account to generate more suitable content.
- Asking ChatGPT to remember things about your family, such as the fact you have a toddler who loves jellyfish, means that when you ask the chatbot to help create a birthday card for your toddler, it suggests something relevant to their interests, like a jellyfish wearing a party hat.
- If you’re a teacher using ChatGPT to help create your lesson plans, telling it what age your students are, how many students you have and the length of each lesson will allow it to reflect this information whenever generating the plans.
Even with certain rules and information saved within your ChatGPT account, there will be a way to converse with the chatbot without including these memories. A new feature called Temporary Chat will provide a blank slate conversation, where ChatGPT won’t be aware of any saved memories, allowing you to receive responses that don’t conform to your previously set rules, without the need to delete and reinstate them all each time.
ChatGPT Memory will roll out slowly as a limited release to a small section of free and Plus users for testing and feedback, with plans to extend the release to more users further down the line.
The memory feature isn’t necessarily a groundbreaking addition to the AI, since you could already input information for ChatGPT to bear in mind within that single conversation thread. But, for anyone who regularly uses the chatbot for similar, routine tasks, it’ll cut out the need to constantly reinform it of your preferences and guidelines.
