Comment by thaumasiotes
1 day ago
Hmmm.
I have a "saved" history in Google Gemini. The reason I put "saved" in scare quotes is that Google feels free to change the parts of that history that were supplied by Gemini. They no longer match my external records of what was said.
Does ChatGPT do the same thing? I'd be queasy about relying on this as evidence.
ChatGPT will generate output and immediately censor it if some oversight code deems it problematic. Ask about court decisions in sex crime cases without being creepy and you can see it in action.
Could you post some details about this or make a write-up? I'd be interested in reading more about this.
I'm not sure what details would add. What happened:
1. I engaged with Gemini.
2. I found the results wanting, and pasted them into comment threads elsewhere on the internet, observing that they tended to support the common criticism of LLMs as being "meaning-blind".
3. Later, I went back and viewed the "history" of my "saved" session.
4. My prompts were not changed, but the responses from Gemini were different. Because of the comment threads, it was easy for me to verify that I was remembering the original exchange correctly and Google was indulging in some revision of history.
If this is verifiably true, you should contact a journalist. Meaning if it's still in your Gemini history and the comments you posted are still up.
This would be a major tech news story. "Google LLM rewriting user history" would be a scandal. And since online evidence is used in court, it could have significant legal implications. You'd be helping people.
This is much too important to merely be a comment on HN.
The fact that this happened and that you have evidence of it make it enormously interesting even if the actual substance of the prompts and the response are mundane as hell. Please post.
Not trying to excuse google but wonder why that happens. I have had my own issues with ChatGPT memory but that's more like it forgets the context and spits out something gibberish at a later invocation counter to what it said earlier in the thread. But that's because it is buggy.
Rewriting history requires computes which is more malicious. Why would someone burn compute to rewrite your stuff given that rewrites are not free? Once again not defending google trying to think through what's going on.
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