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Gen Z set to embrace ChatGPT’s new memory feature, despite apprehension of future threat
Open AI’s chatbot can now remember information logged by users. While anxious about the future possibilities of this new tech, Gen Z are taking it in their stride.
Currently, the bot is only remembering details about ChatGPT Plus subscribers, and the feature isn’t available in Europe or Korea. However, there are plans to offer the feature to OpenAI’s Enterprise and Team customers in the near future. ChatGPT will retain information it gathers from user’s prompts, but users can turn off this memory feature or ask the bot to forget details from a specific chat.
Gen Z’s consensus on AI and it’s frequent updates is complicated by conflicting hopes for the technology’s social benefits, with intuitive fear of the unkown. Young people has grown up with exponential technological advancement, and yet are heading into a world made largely inaccesible by the cost-of-living crisis, and one in three 18- to 24-year-olds now report symptoms indicating they have experienced a common mental health problem compared with one in four in 2000. So, sceptism over the possible benefits of new technology – including AI – is hardly surprising.
“I think the reason Gen Z tend to feel anxious about AI is because we've seen the example of social media, and we've seen that in the wrong hands new tech can effectively make us lose touch with what is actually real,” 20-year-old Spike says. While he harbours hopes that the AI’s memory feature could lessen menial jobs for the everyday worker, he isn’t naive about the importance of regulation.
Cautious as he is, Spike has a ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ mindset. “It certainly seems like advancements are inevitable now, so it's more about working out how to harmonise with it than pushing against it,” he says.
For 25-year-old Betsy, her attitude towards the strides in AI tech is split by her professional and personal identity. A self-proclaimed “avid user” of AI, Betsy’s anxieties about ChatGPT’s new memory won’t stop her from making the most of it. She’s already been making AI even more convenient by programming it with the Customise ChatGPT feature, so sees the latest memory feature as the logical next step. But even as a frequent AI user, Betsy isn’t free of tech-anxiety, “I can’t help being a little apprehensive. If ChatGPT has a memory, the weird questions I ask are no longer forgotten. I can’t fly under the radar.”
She continues: “Things are moving so quickly, God knows where we’re going to be in five years. But it’s so useful in my daily work life, and I don’t find it threatening with where it’s at now.”
AI isn’t useful in every job, and for some members of Gen Z the advantages of AI are too irrelevant in their day-to-day lives to counteract luddite-like fears. 23-year-old sculptor Izzy comments: “I grew up with a lot of post-apocalyptic films, and this feels exactly like the beginning of the end,” she says. “The new feature feels like another way to sell us things. We are now products, and they just want to cater their marketing to us.”
As OpenAI and other Big Tech companies are free to advance without any regulations, it seems that Gen Z are accepting that their fears won’t stop AI from improving. Growing up with the eldritch power of Big Tech towering over them, Gen Z is used to being hopeless against the future of tech, and has learnt to swim the tide.