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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. Fortunately, I had saved partial copies of some conversations and materials, but large parts of my work were lost forever.
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.
Accountability gap
This was not a case of losing random notes or idle chats. Among my discussions with ChatGPT were project folders containing multiple conversations that I had used to develop grant applications, prepare teaching materials, refine publication drafts and design exam analyses. This was intellectual scaffolding that had been built up over a two-year period.
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