What ChatGPT knows about you as researchers uncover detailed psychological insights
ChatGPT could be potentially building a surprisingly detailed picture of your life, including your personality, interests and personal information, without you even realizing.
This comes after a report by Futurism revealed that new research delves into how AI chatbots create digital profiles on its users.
The team of researchers studied the memory system of ChatGPT, finding that AI has the capacity to retain far more than just straightforward personal details, with stored data often including psychological insights about the people who use it.
What does ChatGPT really know about you?
The study was conducted by experts from Germany, India and the Netherlands and presented at the ACM Web Conference 2026, where researchers analyzed how the AI bot records information.
The findings have since raised questions on how much control people really have when it comes to the information AI is able to retain.
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According to the experts, around 28% of AI memories containing user information included personal data under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Meanwhile, roughly 52% included psychological insights.
A whopping 80% of the memories retained by AI are ‘directly grounded in user context’.
The study explains: “To enable personalized and context-aware interactions, conversational AI systems have introduced a new mechanism: Memory. Memory creates what we refer to as the Algorithmic Self-portrait - a new form of personalization derived from users’ self-disclosed information divulged within private conversations.
“While memory enables more coherent exchanges, the underlying processes of memory creation remain opaque, raising critical questions about data sensitivity, user agency, and the fidelity of the resulting portrait.”
Speaking to Gizmodo, lead author Abhisek Dash added: “Earlier, the platforms had one objective: to sell you ads and to mediate an interaction between you and an advertiser, but now, they are actually talking to you, so they may want to know more about you so that they can have an effective conversation.”
However, there is now more public focus on privacy implications as Dash pointed out that there is ‘no boundary anymore’ between users and their AI chatbot, with many using the tech as an advisor, friend, doctor and lawyer.
This means that AI will often have an unprecedented amount of information about an individual, with that person often not even realizing how much data they have offered up.
Dash went on to say: “If the system knows you so well, and if its objective is to cater to your beliefs and validate your thoughts sycophantically to have you come back to it time and again, then it can have disastrous broader implications, anywhere from extreme political polarization to reinforcement of prejudices and biases.”
As a result, many people are calling for more guardrails to be put into place into order to protect the privacy of users.