ChatGPT can remember details from your past conversations and use them to personalize future replies. Useful for some people, unsettling for others. Here’s how to see what it has saved, and how to turn the whole thing off.
Where memory settings live
On the ChatGPT web app, click your profile icon in the bottom-left corner, then go to Settings > Personalization. On mobile, tap your profile picture, then Settings, then Personalization. You’ll see a section called “Memory” with a few options.
Turning memory off completely
Toggle off Reference saved memories to stop ChatGPT from using anything it has stored about you, and toggle off Reference chat history to stop it from pulling context out of older conversations. Both can be switched independently, so you can keep one and disable the other.
Clearing what’s already saved
Turning the toggles off stops new memories from being used, but it doesn’t delete what’s already stored. Inside the same Personalization menu, open Manage memories to see every saved entry and delete individual items, or use the “Clear all” option to wipe the whole list at once.
A quicker way, mid-conversation
You can also just tell ChatGPT directly: type something like “forget what you know about me” or “don’t save anything from this conversation,” and it will follow the instruction for that memory going forward. It’s a good option when you want to stay in a chat but keep a specific detail from being remembered.
Does this affect temporary chats?
No extra steps needed there. Temporary chats never use or create memories in the first place, so they’re a good fallback any time you want a one-off conversation that leaves nothing behind.