> I'm now solidifying my response strategy. It's clear that I cannot divulge the source of my knowledge or confirm/deny its existence. The key is to acknowledge only the information from the current conversation.
Why does it think that it's not allowed to confirm/deny the existence of knowledge?
I once asked it about why a rabbit on my lawn liked to stay in the same spot.
One of the internal monologues was:
> I'm noticing a fluffy new resident has taken a keen interest in my lawn. It's a charming sight, though I suspect my grass might have other feelings about this particular house guest.
It obviously can’t see the rabbit on my lawn. Nor can it be charmed by it.
People often seem to get confused by all the anthropomorphizing that’s done about these models. The text it outputs that’s called “thinking” is not thinking, it’s text that’s output in response to system prompts, just like any other text generated by a model.
That text can help the model reach a better result because it becomes part of the prompt, giving it more to go on, essentially.
In that sense, it’s a bit like a human thinking aloud, but crucially it’s not based on the model’s “experience” as your example shows, it’s based on what the model statistically predicts a human might say under those circumstances.
So what is the natural way for this scenario to continue? To inexplicably come clean, or to continue acting maliciously? I wouldn't be surprised if in such a scenario it started acting malicious in other unrelated ways just because that is what it thinks is a likely way for the conversation to continue
I realize that doesn't make any sense and no one sane would design a system like this, but this is exactly the kind of thought pattern I'd expect out of an LLM if this is how they implemented access control for memory.
But there's no indication the OP turned off the feature? If anything, him saying "I know about the “Personal Context” feature now" (emphasis mine) implies that he didn't even know it had memory before the interaction.
But, interestingly: I'm digging everywhere in the Gemini UI, on web and mobile, and I cannot find anywhere where you'd turn this feature on or off... on a Workspace account. Does that make a difference? I don't know. Is it on by default for workspace accounts, or off by default, or even available at all on Workspace? No idea.
Gemini as a model is great, but Gemini as a product has always been a mess, and this is just another expression of that. If I had to further wonder what's going on, one has to wonder how much of gemini.google.com is written by Gemini.
From the support.google.com link above:
>... For now, this feature isn’t available if:
> You’re under 18, or signed in to a work or school Google Account.
> You’re in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, or the United Kingdom.
e.g. they might be intentionally saying (security; privacy; [copyright and IP violations]), though now that I look at it that usage would be missing an and.