When two years of academic work vanished with a single click

"Within a couple of years of ChatGPT coming out, I had come to rely on the artificial-intelligence tool, for my work as a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany. Having signed up for OpenAI's subscription plan, ChatGPT Plus, I used it as an assistant every day - to write e-mails, draft course descriptions, structure grant applications, revise publications, prepare lectures, create exams and analyse student responses, and even as an interactive tool as part of my teaching."

"It was fast and flexible, and I found it reliable in a specific sense: it was always available, remembered the context of ongoing conversations and allowed me to retrieve and refine previous drafts. I was well aware that large language models such as those that power ChatGPT can produce seemingly confident but sometimes incorrect statements, so I never equated its reliability with factual accuracy, but instead relied on the continuity and apparent stability of the workspace."

"But in August, I temporarily disabled the 'data consent' option because I wanted to see whether I would still have access to all of the model's functions if I did not provide OpenAI with my data. At that moment, all of my chats were permanently deleted and the project folders were emptied - two years of carefully structured academic work disappeared. No warning appeared. There was no undo option. Just a blank page."

"At first, I thought it was a mistake. I tried different browsers, devices and networks. I cleared the cache, reinstalled the app and even changed the settings back and forth. Nothing helped. When I contacted OpenAI's support, the first responses came from an AI agent. Only after repeated enquiries did a human employee respond, but the answer remained the same: the data were permanently lost and could not be recovered."

A professor relied daily on ChatGPT Plus for a wide range of academic tasks, valuing its speed, flexibility, and preservation of conversational context and drafts. The professor distinguished workspace continuity from factual accuracy when using the model. After disabling the 'data consent' option to test data access, all chats and project folders were permanently deleted without warning or an undo option, erasing two years of structured academic work. Attempts to recover the data via different browsers, devices, cache clearing, reinstalling, and contacting support failed. Support initially replied via an AI agent; a human later confirmed permanent data loss. Partial local backups preserved only fragments.

Read at Nature