By Nicole Nguyen
It might be time to break up with your chatbot.
The reasons for moving on -- or at least trying a new one -- are piling up fast. Companies are constantly releasing new AI models with more powerful capabilities. Perhaps your favorite bot is suffering from a temporary outage, and you want a backup plan. Switching is easy, and you don't have to start over.
But first, you need to peer into your chatbot's memory, a log of personal context built from your conversations.
Looking at ChatGPT's file on me felt like snooping through something I wasn't supposed to, like a therapist's notes. Apparently, I like "a warm Scandinavian aesthetic" and I'm sensitive to tone, with a preference for "restrained language over hype."
OpenAI's rivals, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini, offer simple tools to port over your custom instructions from a competitor. It starts with a precise prompt that generates a profile of your interests and habits. Or at least, what the AI thinks are your preferences.
I wanted to move ChatGPT's observations to my current favored chatbot, Claude. Despite all the AI has learned about my preferences, I now prefer Claude's writing style. I've also been relying on the app's agentic platform, Claude Cowork, to manage more life admin. So, I decided: It's time to switch.
Even if you aren't planning to switch AI apps, extracting this data is worth the effort. It reveals exactly what the AI knows about your likes and dislikes -- and allows you to correct the record.
Accessing your chatbot's memory
It's amusing to look at your life through an AI's lens. I highly recommend reviewing the personal file it keeps on you.
The level of detail can be creepy, sure, but it's also what makes the chatbot valuable.
Because the bot remembers you have a nut allergy, it won't suggest noodles with peanut sauce. Or if you've asked for off-the-beaten-path recommendations, it won't propose visiting the Eiffel Tower. It also writes instructions on the kind of responses you prefer: less enthusiastic writing, perhaps, or bullet points instead of long-winded paragraphs.
In Claude's Privacy and ChatGPT's Personalization settings, you can view and manage memories, deleting any facts that aren't relevant. In Gemini, you must delete specific chats to remove that information from your digital profile.
However, I found that prompting the bot reveals much more interesting details than what shows up in Settings.
Ask: " What do you remember about me?"
Follow up with: " What other behavioral preferences have you noted?" or " What have you learned about my likes and dislikes?"
Try these questions with your own bot to yield even more substantive responses.
Since I first looked at ChatGPT's memory last year, the bot has learned a lot more about me. Not just factual details like that I "live in an urban setting with space constraints," but also qualitative ones. These include frequent optimizations "for limited time and energy," and my "bias toward reversible decisions."
You can also prompt the bot to retain additional inclinations, and delete current ones. "Remember that I value durability and repairability in my decision-making for future recommendations," I prompted, adding: "Forget that I have an interest in AI."
ChatGPT happily obliged.
Moving your memories
If you're new to Gemini and Claude, switching tools can fast-track the rapport you've built with your existing AI bot. While you can migrate memories on mobile, a web browser is the better choice because you'll need to copy big blocks of text.
In Gemini settings, click on Import memory. Take the suggested prompt and feed it to your current chatbot. Once the other app generates a response, you can copy the output and paste it back into Gemini.
From the same page, you can also export your chat history from ChatGPT or Claude, and upload the chats to Gemini.
In Claude, go to Settings, then Privacy. Next to Memory preferences, click Manage. You'll see an option to Import memory from other AI providers. Click Start import to copy Claude's suggested prompt for extracting memories from another bot. Anthropic says the tool is "experimental and still in active development," and there is no option to import chat history.
ChatGPT lacks a formal memory-importer. Instead, copy the export prompts from Claude or Gemini, available to all free users, and paste the results into a ChatGPT chat window with a simple command: "Remember this."
In the app's Settings, then Personalization, you can also type in custom instructions for behavior and tone, as well as your interests and other preferences.
Don't want the AI to remember a conversation? Chat with a blank slate. Gemini and ChatGPT call it "temporary chat," while Claude refers to it as "incognito mode." You'll find a ghost or dotted chat bubble icon on the top right of the new-chat screen. When this setting is active, the chat vanishes from history and won't influence future responses.
This exercise confirmed that my chatbot knows a lot, perhaps too much. But it also missed the obvious. For example, while I often asked for help with French administrative tasks, the bot never surmised that I lived in Paris.
I also wondered, as Claude adds more memories to my digital file, am I unknowingly creating my own filter bubble? Ultimately, I think personalized responses are valuable, though I did delete some of ChatGPT's observations, even if they were true, before importing them into Claude.
Moving our profiles between chatbots is likely something we'll all become familiar with. In the AI race, the winner is far from settled.
Write to Nicole Nguyen at nicole.nguyen@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 11, 2026 12:00 ET (16:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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