Comment by sonink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sonink | Hacker News Reader

Its a bit wild to me that there hasnt been a pushback against enabling memories by frontier AI companies. This data is something advertisers could only dream off. Before AI, most of this data was approximated by whatever little information could be gleaned from the websites we visit. But now people are handing over their deepest darkest secrets and pretty much EVERYTHING to AI on a platter.

Maybe its just me who is paranoid because I happen to spend a fair bit of time in the advertising world, but the first thing I did when memory was launched on Claude/Chatgpt - was to switch them off. And it helps that they are not even useful, and would actually downgrade your experience by polluting the context of irrelevant details. I go one step ahead - if there is a personal discussion you want to have - maybe use another account like provided by the likes of companies like openrouter etc.

I would argue that we should have regulation that should prohibit the storage of user profile information by AI companies, and any such memories feature should exclusively reside on the users servers. Infact, maybe go one step ahead, that 'memory' firms cannot be owned by AI firms and vice versa.

I've found memory somewhat useful as i don't need to give it all the context for everything, that said it's equally as annoying when it latches onto something I said in a different chat and derails the conversation because of that.

Data harvesting is one of the core value propositions for many of these companies (from the investor's perspective).

Companies that built their models on public data and illegal scraping/copyrighted works, amassing massive datasets on the most private aspects of countless individuals, and creating a huge bubble with potentially humongous implications upon implosion. Oh, and, increasing wealth concentration and inequality by an incredible amount.

The future is here.

I think there will eventually be pushback from companies that want to keep their IP secrets. The current standard of "we dont train on your data" but we summarize all your input and output, meaning its not your data anymore and we can train on that.

while I agree with the sentiment in general, I think it's safe to say that people have been giving up their darkest secrets to google and social media companies for many years.

Some people feel there is nothing they can do about it. Many people do not know / understand just how much they can know about people, so seeing it that way, yes it can be surprising to see so many giving the data right on the screen; as opposed to giving data passively / not understanding the value of combining or that they are even collecting passive data like location or what you type and delete, or what you hover / keep on screen..

I don't have hope that there will be any laws stopping the collecting and combining of data by any of these companies.

I do like the idea of an every year reminder sent to users showing what they can see with the data that has been collected and stored.

That is doable, and possible to get people to change some of what they share if the portals are honest in what they collect and how it can be combined with other data to paint more intimate / detailed pictures of you and those connected to you in some way.

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