Last week I
told the story of someone who had an inappropriate thing come up when he asked ChatGPT "tell me something embarrassing about me" in front of his coworkers.
Someone countered that it was his fault, because he should have remembered that it could call up that fact.
But I don't think that's right.
When he originally had that conversation with ChatGPT, it didn't combine insights across chats.
It was in a context where it would be lost in a sea of other conversations, never to come up again.
Because it would be lost, he didn't have to remember that it was there.
But then ChatGPT changed its behavior to have a dossier derived from all past conversations, changing the context.
It reminds me of when Facebook's newsfeed feature came out.
Technically it didn't change what people could see.
But it changed the context of what people would actually see; changes that previously nobody might notice now were potentially blasted out to everyone you knew.
That change in context feels like a betrayal to users.