Aydın Tiryaki (2026)

“Note: This article contains minor spoilers regarding the plot and character development of the movie 50 First Dates as part of the thematic analogy.”

The 2004 film 50 First Dates introduced us to the tragic yet heartwarming story of Lucy (Drew Barrymore). Following a car accident, Lucy suffers from “Goldfield Syndrome”—a fictional condition where her short-term memory is wiped clean every night while she sleeps. Each morning, she wakes up believing it is the day of her accident, stuck in a perpetual loop.

Today, our interactions with Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models (LLMs) are built upon an engineering architecture that mirrors Lucy’s cinematic predicament in striking ways.

1. Statelessness: Day One, Every Time

Most AI models are inherently “stateless.” When you open a new chat window, the model returns to “ground zero,” much like Lucy waking up on the morning of October 13th. Any rules taught, errors corrected, or memories shared in previous sessions mean nothing in the new one unless they are hard-coded into the system’s permanent layer. To the model, every new session is the very first time it has ever met you.

2. The Context Window: Lucy’s Single Day

In the movie, Lucy can learn new things throughout the day and retain them until she falls asleep. In the world of AI, this is known as the Context Window. A model has a finite capacity for how much information it can “hold in its head” during a single conversation. As a dialogue grows longer, early instructions or shared details eventually get pushed out of this window. At that moment, the “sun sets” for the AI, and like Lucy, it begins to forget the beginning of the day.

3. From Video Tapes to System Instructions

Henry Roth (Adam Sandler) prepares video tapes for Lucy to watch every morning so she can understand her situation and move forward with her life. These tapes serve as a prosthetic for her missing long-term memory. Today’s “Custom Instructions” or “System Prompts” serve exactly the same purpose. The user records preferences and rules in this section so that the model reads this “tape” at the start of every interaction, allowing it to adapt to the user’s reality without needing to be retaught from scratch.

4. The User as Henry Roth: Patience and Effort

The most critical role in this analogy belongs not to Lucy, but to Henry. Henry Roth redesigns how he presents information every single morning just to stay part of Lucy’s world. This is the essence of modern Prompt Engineering. The patience required to remind an AI of a specific preference or a forbidden word is identical to Henry’s dedication in showing Lucy those tapes day after day.

Conclusion

“50 First Dates” may be a romantic comedy, but it highlights how vital data, memory, and continuity are to forming an identity. Our relationship with AI currently mirrors Henry’s patient struggle to be remembered by Lucy. As technology evolves, we look toward a future where models overcome this “digital amnesia” to become true thought partners with a shared history and a lasting memory.

---

A Note on Methods and Tools: All observations, ideas, and solution proposals in this study are the author’s own. AI was utilized as an information source for researching and compiling relevant topics strictly based on the author’s inquiries, requests, and directions; additionally, it provided writing assistance during the drafting process. (The research-based compilation and English writing process of this text were supported by AI as a specialized assistant.)