Scientist loses two years’ worth of work with a single ChatGPT click

A German professor says that if one click can delete years of work, then ChatGPT cannot be considered completely safe for professional use.

Marcel Bucher, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany, started using ChatGPT soon after it was launched.

He signed up for ChatGPT Plus, a subscription plan, and used the chatbot for everyday tasks, including writing emails and drafting course descriptions, structuring grant applications, and creating exams.

While well aware of potential ChatGPT hallucinations, Bucher relied on the tool for its ability to remember the context of ongoing conversations as well as retrieve and refine previous drafts.

In August, he temporarily disabled the “data consent” option to see if he could access all the model’s functions without providing his data to OpenAI.

“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,” Bucher writes in Nature.

Trying different browsers, devices, and networks didn’t help. When the professor eventually contacted OpenAI’s customer support, he was told that the data had been permanently lost and could not be recovered.

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.

Marcel Bucher

In its response to Nature, OpenAI said the company provides a confirmation prompt before a user permanently deletes a chat. However, once deleted, content cannot be recovered, as this aligns with “privacy best practices and legal requirements around user data.”

ChatGPT uses conversations and interactions to train its models, but users can opt out of model training by choosing to turn off the “Improve the model for everyone” feature in the Settings’ “Data Control” section.

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Logged-in users can also make a copy of ChatGPT's history and download it.

As of now, disabling data training in ChatGPT’s free version doesn’t delete previous conversations. This can be done by selecting the “Delete all chats” option, which prompts confirmation before deleting all chat history.

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