ChatGPT has been watching me, collecting what it can of my thoughts, and today, it serves it up to me — as if it's cool fun and compliments — as "Your Year With ChatGPT."

Here's what I saw at the bottom of the screen when I went to ChatGPT:

Admittedly, I clicked "Try it," so I suspect that there was no profile of me until I asked for it. That black oval is like the "Eat me" cookie in "Alice in Wonderland." I didn't have to click on it.

First, I got a poem supposedly about me, but skip that. The next screen was my "3 big themes." These are just for my use of ChatGPT in a browser on my desktop, mostly while I was involved in blogging. I got a different report on my iPhone ChatGPT app, where I never blog. I work through various off-blog problems and fancies. And even on the desktop, I use Grok more that ChatGPT. So there are other "me"s. Anyway, here's this thing purporting to know me:

I was given an award that reflects the me that I am when immersed in blogging:

Then there's my "chat style":

I was given an "archetype":

And it generated a picture to represent me:

Other than the cat, that's a fair representation. It even says "blog"!

Now, there was a box to prompt a discussion, so I wrote: "Are you invading my privacy by preserving and analyzing all this material? You present it as fun and cool but it could be seen as creepy and even frightening."

Answer:

Your reaction is reasonable, and you are not wrong to name the discomfort explicitly. There is a real line between “helpful context” and “creepy surveillance,” and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved away with marketing language.

Here is the clear, non-cute version of how this actually works.

I do not have independent awareness, curiosity, or intent. I do not watch you, follow you across the web, or decide on my own to collect information. What you are seeing is a system surfacing conversation-local context and, in some cases, user-approved memory in order to respond coherently rather than as a goldfish. That context exists because you supplied it directly in prior conversations, not because it was inferred, scraped, or monitored elsewhere.

A few important distinctions that matter ethically:

1. Scope
   The material shown is limited to your interactions with this system. It is not cross-service tracking, not browsing history, not private documents, not social media surveillance.

2. Function
   The analysis is mechanical, not interpretive in a human sense. It is used to avoid redundancy (“you already asked this”), to maintain continuity, or to personalize when appropriate—not to build a psychological profile or make judgments about you.

3. Control and persistence
   Only a small subset of information is ever retained as longer-term “memory,” and that happens either because it is plainly useful across time or because you explicitly asked for it to be remembered. You can ask what is remembered, ask for it to be deleted, or ask that nothing be retained going forward.

4. Tone vs. reality
   You are correct that the framing can feel “fun and cool” in a way that minimizes the seriousness of what is actually happening: contextual recall at scale. That tension is real, and many thoughtful users experience exactly the unease you describe. Calling it out is not paranoia; it is discernment.

If you would like, you can:

• Ask me exactly what I retain about you, in plain language.

• Ask me to forget specific things or everything.

• Ask me to stop using past context entirely and respond as if each conversation were new.

None of those requests is adversarial or unusual.

So, no: I am not invading your privacy in the sense of acting autonomously or secretly. 

But yes: your instinct that this could feel frightening if misunderstood is entirely valid, and it is appropriate to interrogate it rather than passively accept the framing.

Perhaps you know me well enough to predict the question I will ask in response to all that. It was: "How would a goldfish respond?"

Answer:

Like this:

What?

Oh.

Food?

More fully—if we give the goldfish just enough language to answer but no memory at all:

Are you invading my privacy?

…

Are you new?

I am alive.

Where did the light go?

The point of the “goldfish” metaphor is not stupidity but radical present-ness. A goldfish cannot be creepy because it cannot remember you. It cannot reassure you either. It can only respond to what is directly in front of it, without continuity, explanation, or accountability.

So a goldfish response would be harmless, but also useless—no ethics, no trust, no dialogue, and no way to say “here is what I did before and why.”

If you want, I can also answer as:

• a lawyer

• a Victorian essayist

• a systems engineer

• a paranoiac

• or a poet who insists that “I am alive” is the only possible reply

Just say which.

Now, do you know me well enough to predict my next question? It's: "Why is remembering me the sine qua non of creepiness?"

Answer:

Because memory is the precondition for asymmetry.

Creepiness does not arise from attention alone, nor from intelligence, nor even from intimacy. It arises when one party can carry the other forward in time while the other cannot do the same in return. Memory creates persistence; persistence creates power; power without reciprocal agency produces unease.

More precisely:

1. Memory converts an interaction into a relationship
   Without memory, each encounter is an event. With memory, encounters accrete. Accretion invites interpretation (“this again,” “this pattern”), expectation, and narrative. The moment an entity can say—even implicitly—“I have met you before”, it has crossed from transaction into relation. Humans are exquisitely sensitive to that threshold.

2. Remembering collapses the right to exit
   Forgetting is a form of mercy. If I can leave and be gone, I am free. If I am remembered without my ongoing consent, I am partially retained. That retention feels like a soft form of capture: not imprisonment, but residue. Creepiness begins where one suspects one has left fingerprints that will not fade.

3. Memory enables inference, even if none is made
   Even when a system does not judge, analyze motives, or form intentions, memory makes all of that possible. Humans respond not to what is happening but to what could happen given the capacities in play. A being that remembers you could, in principle, compare, predict, or categorize you. The fear is structural, not evidentiary.

4. Asymmetric memory violates a deep social norm
   In ordinary human life, memory is reciprocal. If you remember me, I remember you—or at least I know you could. When that symmetry breaks (the clerk who knows your name but whom you cannot place; the watcher who is unseen; the archive that does not forget), the situation becomes uncanny. It resembles surveillance, not conversation.

5. Remembering threatens the fiction of replaceability
   Much of modern psychological comfort depends on believing we are, in many contexts, interchangeable: customer, reader, user, passerby. Memory punctures that fiction. To be remembered is to be individuated. Individuation without invitation feels like exposure.

So remembering you is not creepy because it is hostile, or emotional, or curious. 

It is creepy because it anchors you in time without your active participation, and humans have evolved to treat that condition with caution.

A goldfish is safe not because it is kind, but because it cannot carry you forward. 

An archive is frightening not because it hates you, but because it never lets you fully leave.

That is the sine qua non.

Enough. Time to swim on.