What the system remembers about the actor is theirs to inspect, correct, scope, and erase — per fact, per conversation, or by stepping outside memory altogether.
Forms
Recurring forms: a reviewable memory list with per-item deletion, memory scope set per message or per thread, incognito sessions that leave no trace, and graph views of what has accumulated.
Consequences
- what the system holds about the actor is inspectable and editable: continuity becomes a visible, revocable grant rather than an ambient accumulation
- forgetting is now a feature — per item, per session, or per mode — and it has an interface cost the invisible version never paid
- curating memory is work most actors will not do until something goes wrong, so the defaults of what gets kept do most of the governing
Resources & references
- Shape of AI — Memory, Incognito Mode, Data ownership
- AI UX Playground — Memory Scope Toggle, Memory Management
- aiuxdesign.guide — Selective Memory
- AI Interface Layout Library — AI Memory Graph
Appears in
Memory and continuity
- Deciding what is kept, step 3 — Choose what is kept about the actor
- Enforcing the limits on memory, step 1 — Let the actor remove what is remembered
Related patterns
Enacts
- Privacy — turns held-forward data into something the actor can see, scope, and revoke
- Adaptability — memory is what the system adapts from
Complements
- AI tuning — remembered facts and shaped behaviour are two channels of the same persistence
Related to
- Settings — where memory controls conventionally live
- Activity log — what the system did versus what it keeps