Question: Why don't Claude or ChatGPT get message timestamps?
Go to any conversation you’ve had with Claude or ChatGPT in their chat apps and ask them what time they sent their last message, and you’ll find they don’t see timestamps for any of the messages in your chat history. They might guess or hallucinate an answer but they’ll be wildly off and if you probe further they should admit they don’t see timestamps at all, they only know the current time. I’ve also noticed generally that if you pick up conversations over multiple days, it doesn’t know that days have passed in between messages.
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Me: How much time has passed since your last message?
Claude: I don't have a way to measure the gap between my messages—I don't have a clock running between turns, and nothing in our conversation timestamps the messages for me. So I can't tell you how much time has passed since my last reply. Could've been seconds, could've been days.
If it's useful, I can check the current time, but that would only tell you now, not the interval since I last wrote.
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This is very bizarre to me and seems like an obvious flaw in the product, but both major AI companies are doing this and not implementing the obvious solution of surfacing message timestamps. Does anyone know why they don’t do this?
For an example of the type of issue this causes, I’ve been using Claude for advice while my dog is going through medical treatment and it’s very concerning because I’ll say I gave him some medicine and then later ask questions about a symptom he’s displaying and Claude doesn’t seem to know whether the medicine was minutes ago or days ago and usually doesn’t ask for clarification either. I’ve learned to either be explicit about how much time has passed or just not ask it questions where timing would be a factor. But I’m surprised because this seems like it should be an easy thing to address.