For all their many capabilities, AI platforms have long had one annoying flaw – a terrible memory. That’s meant a lot of time-consuming frustration for AI users, who’ve had to remind the likes of Gemini who they are and what they want at the start of every session.

But now, following in the footsteps of fierce rival OpenAI, Google is rolling out updates that will allow Gemini to remember a user’s “key details and preferences”. It’s a further step towards ‘automatic memory’ after a Google update released last year that allowed Gemini to remember a user’s personal interests.

OpenAI has been rolling out memory features in ChatGPT since early 2024. It’s learned the hard way that automatic memory can be a double-edged sword, especially for more vulnerable users.

AI platforms remembering previous interactions makes them seem more like humans, blurring boundaries. This has led to ‘delusional chats’, where users come to treat AI as a friend, partner or therapist. Some of these delusional chats are alleged to have resulted in tragic outcomes, including suicide.

AI can transport people into strange worlds

With ChatGPT is scrambling to mitigate the risks associated with automatic memory, Google is proceeding cautiously.

A Google spokesperson said, “Our focus has been building a personal AI assistant, and Gemini learning your preferences is key to this. Equally crucial is giving you easy controls to choose the experience that’s best for you, so you can turn this feature on and off at any time.”

Google is rolling out the memory-improving feature from today, starting with the Gemini 2.5 Pro model in a handful of nations. The plan is then to bring it to more markets and the Gemini 2.5 Flash model.

Google is also changing how its privacy settings work. In the weeks to come, it will rename the ‘Gemini Apps Activity’ setting to ‘Keep Activity’. If you enable this, Google will use “a sample” of the files and photos you upload to “help improve Google services for everyone”.

Gemini users can also safeguard their privacy by taking the ‘temporary chats’ option. As the name suggests, Google won’t use these chats to personalise your future conversations with Gemini or to train its AI models and will only save them for 72 hours.