OpenAI's Temporary Chat instructions, checked October 23, 2026, explain the current controls.
Start with the context you actually want
You cannot change personalization after the first message. Neither choice writes memories while the chat remains temporary.
Consider this fictional situation: you usually ask for camping equipment suggestions, but today you are buying a desk gift for a colleague. You can supply the relevant facts yourself:
Help me compare a small desk plant and a notebook as a retirement gift.
The recipient works at a shared desk and cannot leave belongings there overnight.
Budget: $25, including a card.
Use only these preferences. Ask if an important detail is missing.
Compare the practical drawbacks before suggesting one choice.
The shared-desk condition gives the answer something concrete to work with. Check that the suggestion respects it. A recommendation that depends on leaving a plant in the office still needs correction, regardless of which chat mode you selected.
A personal formatting preference might be useful for this comparison; a remembered camping interest may be irrelevant. Decide which context you want before starting. Review how ChatGPT memory works when the issue is an ongoing preference.
Decide whether to save the result
The chat stays out of history unless saved and cannot be reopened there after leaving. Saving converts it to a regular chat governed by your account's personalization and model-improvement settings. Workspace restrictions still apply.
Before saving the gift discussion, ask whether you need the full conversation or just your final decision. A short note such as “Notebook, because the desk is shared” may be enough for the shopping list. That choice is about what you need to keep; a copied note has the storage rules of wherever you put it.
Understand the retention boundary
While temporary, the chat is excluded from model improvement; OpenAI may retain a copy for up to 30 days for safety. This is not anonymity or instant erasure. Third-party actions follow the recipient's privacy rules.
Use the mode for the intended one-off conversation, choose its context before typing, and decide whether you need to save it before leaving. If the problem is instead finding an older regular conversation, changing this mode will not recover that conversation.