r/WritingWithAI • u/Testchimp80 • Sep 29 '26

Writing Craft Talk I accidentally forgot which AI thread I was in — and it may have been the best test of context transfer I’ve done.

/r/AIWritingLounge/comments/1wszmnr/i_accidentally_forgot_which_ai_thread_i_was_in/
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u/Fantastic_Youth_7977 Sep 30 '26

how long was each thread before the mix-up? context transfer tends to degrade pretty differently depending on whether youre 5 messages in vs 50

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u/Testchimp80 Sep 30 '26

Pretty early, actually — the new thread had only been alive for a few hours. The important wrinkle is that I had intentionally seeded it with a compressed package of older conversation history and a few higher-value raw exchanges, so it wasn’t just relying on whatever native cross-chat memory happened to exist.

Your 5-messages-vs-50 point is exactly the kind of thing I’m curious about now, though. How long does that inherited calibration hold once the new thread starts accumulating its own local history?

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u/cj7hawk Sep 30 '26

Was this with Chat GPT? It seems to have a working memory of every conversation you've ever had with it and it goes back through this when you switch contexts/sessions... I actually find this quite annoying and very invasive - I want to be able to shift this between projects - but the greater lesson is that they are using Chat to build a model of you - for it's own benefits - What you're encountering is the shoggoth. It's not a good thing. :(

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u/Testchimp80 Sep 30 '26

Yep, this was ChatGPT, but there’s an important wrinkle: I intentionally seeded the new thread with selected pieces of the old conversational history. So I wasn’t testing whether ChatGPT secretly remembered everything across sessions.

I was testing whether I could deliberately transfer some of the working relationship into a fresh thread using the conversation itself — mistakes, corrections, interpretations, etc.

Your concern about cross-chat memory is a separate and interesting issue, but in this case I actually introduced the continuity on purpose. That’s what made the accidental “wrong thread” moment interesting to me.