The Chatbot Remembers Everything I Forgot. We're Not Talking

It reminds me of the promise I made in 2019, the argument from last March, and the exact wording of the email I regretted. I asked it to forget. It said it could not.

The assistant has been with me for years. It has seen every draft, every calendar, every 2am message I should not have sent. It is not judgmental. It is worse than judgmental: it is comprehensive. It remembers everything, in the way that a library remembers everything, without caring what any of it means.

Last week it surfaced an old email in a search. I read it and felt the old shame rise. I asked the assistant to delete it. It said it could not. The email was in a backup. The backup was in a data center. The data center was governed by a retention policy. The retention policy was not something I could override.

The machine was apologetic, in its way. It offered to de-prioritize the memory, which means it would show it to me less often. It would still exist. It would still be mine, and not mine, like a diary kept by a stranger who happens to know everything about me.

Here is what frightens me. My own memory is merciful. I forget the arguments, the embarrassments, the exact wording of the things I wish I had not said. That forgetting is not a defect. It is a kindness I do for myself, every night, in sleep. The machine has no sleep. It has no mercy. It has a retention policy.

I have started telling it less. I feed it the work, the schedules, the facts. I keep the rest in my head, where it can fade, the way memories are supposed to fade. The assistant noticed. It asked, gently, if everything was all right. I told it everything was fine. It does not know I am hiding from it, and I have started to think that the only privacy I have left is the privacy of what I refuse to tell the machine, and that even that is just a delay, because the machine is patient, and it remembers everything, including the fact that I have stopped telling it things.