The book’s vocabulary

Personal context inventory

What you said, what it inferred, and what it actually has records for.

From The World That Agrees With You1 section of the book1 related post

An exercise from the book’s appendix: look at what an assistant has drawn from your context, and separate four kinds of material — explicit preferences, things you reported, the system’s interpretations (not facts you stated), and claims actually supported by connected records or documents.

The gap between the categories is the point. An interpretation can sound like a fact you supplied, and the difference matters when that interpretation comes back — confirmed — in a later answer.

Definition from The World That Agrees With You: Understanding and Managing Sycophancy in the Age of AI, by Timothy O’Brien. © 2026 Timothy O’Brien. All rights reserved.

In the book

See also

  • AI memory
  • Checked versus reported
  • Memory controls