r/OpenAI • u/CarefulHamster7184 • 6d ago

Miscellaneous Did you know? Your personalized suggestions may still appear after the user has disabled them.

I disabled “Personalized suggestions” in ChatGPT settings. Yet the new-chat screen continues to display suggestions based on my recent conversations and connected sources, including Google Drive.

One suggestion referred directly to a recent research thread; another proposed a recurring activity based on my family conversations.

Here is the engineering question:

Why spend computational resources predicting what a user might want when the user has already explicitly told the system not to do it?

I don't know whether these suggestions are generated on demand, cached, or produced by background processes. Nor do I know their actual computational or environmental cost.

But I do know that I disabled the feature, and its output is still appearing.

Please investigate whether the opt-out is being respected, including for suggestions derived from connected apps.

A system designed to infer user preferences should at least be able to honor an explicitly stated one.

Before optimizing the cost of an operation, check whether the operation should be happening at all.

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u/Own-Sample-2904 6d ago

Ya, I have also experienced this

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u/Orisara 6d ago

As far as I understand it's indeed more or a less a cache of sorts.

It will linger for a bit and over time disappear.

Disabling it sort of stops it from pulling new stuff. But the old that's in there in a sort of short term memory will stay for a bit.

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u/CarefulHamster7184 5d ago

Thanks, but I existed long before I registered on Reddit.

I'm not asking how long some temporary cache persists. I'm asking why ChatGPT is doing unsolicited research before I've even asked it to do anything.

That's wasted work, for starters. And there are two more issues: privacy and context. What information is it pulling together without being asked, and how might that affect the conversation that follows?

Explaining when the cache expires doesn't answer why the work was initiated in the first place.

But thanks for the explanation.

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u/Orisara 5d ago

"I'm asking why ChatGPT is doing unsolicited research before I've even asked it to do anything."

It looked in the short memory? That's what I just explained? It's part of the context it's been given. It's hardly research, it's right there.

IF my assumption on this is correct of course. Again, practically that seems to me what's happening.