> 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.

So your grant applications were written by AI, your lectures were written by AI, your publications were written by AI, and your students exams were marked by AI? Buddy what were YOU doing?

The lost "work" is two years of ChatGPT logs. Sounds like AI systems had concrete benefits to this researcher in a number of applications, but I'm not sure how I feel that their discussions with AIs are so casually being described as "work". Seems slightly misleading?

This issue looks like a situation where one person stored all their files and folders in the Windows Recycle Bin and somebody emptied it.

It might be my professional deformation, but I never store anything in ChatGPT and Claude for longer than a day or two.

I really liked Angela Collier’s rant on this topic https://youtu.be/7pqF90rstZQ.

”Dr Flattery always wrong robot” is such a wonderful way to describe ChatGPT and friends when used like this <3

Never rely on any subscription based service for any data that is important. Never use data formats that lock you in. Especially not online services without (automatic) export options.

Keep a copy (cloud) and a backup (offline) for all you own data.

I had had my fair share of data loss lessons. For us, it is easy to say, “Why didn’t you back up?” But most people have an innate trust in tools, especially from big companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook/Meta. I have heard so many people happily claim, “I won’t worry. I have it on Google.”

Even for my daughters’ much simpler school homework, projects, and the usual drawings/sketches, I’ve set up Backups so they don’t cry when their work gets lost. I set up the Macs I handed down to them to be backed up to iCloud, and added a cheap HDD for Time Machine. They think I’m a Magician with Computers when I teach them to use the Time Machine and see the flying timeline of their work. The other thing is the Google Workspace for Schools. I have found that having a local copy always available via a tool (such as InSync) does wonders.

The only sob story now is Games. They sometimes lose points, the game coin thingies, and developer-kids with bugs that reset gameplay earnings. I have no idea how to help them there besides emotional support and how the world works — one step at a time.

How about if ChatGPT/Claude writes a local Markdown copy of each conversation? Won’t that be Nice?

A lot of snark in the comments, but I think author is absolutely right: this should har come with a big warning and that warning should have had 3 options:

1) go ahead and delete everything 2) back up and then go ahead 3) abort and keep things as they are

ChatGPT definitely wants to be the copilot of all your work. Guy didn’t just have chats, he had drafts that his virtual assistant helped formulate and proof read. Give how big and used ChatGPT has become, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone tech savvy that this is being used for serious work outside of vibecoders.

Are we supposed to feel sorry for this person, or chuckle at them? This is like storing all your data on a floppy disk you never back up and then accidentally dropping it in the toilet.

This is exactly why I don't rely on the web UI for anything critical. It seems like a mistake to treat a chat log as a durable filesystem. I just hit the API and store the request/response pairs in a local Postgres DB. It's a bit of extra boilerplate to manage the context, but at least I own the data and can back it up properly.

The question i have: did he anonymize or ask his students before putting their name and work into ChatGPT? because that's a RGPD violation if he didn't.

Those are rookie numbers.

This guy [1] (in Swedish) was digitizing a municipal archive. 25 years later, the IT department (allegedly) accidentally deleted his entire work. With no backup.

Translated:

> For at least 25 years, work was underway to create a digital, searchable list of what was in the central archive in Åstorp municipality. Then everything was deleted by the IT department.

> “It felt empty and meaningless,” says Rasko Jovanovic.

> He saw his nearly 18 years of work in the archive destroyed. HD was the first to report on it.

> “I was close, so close to taking sick leave. I couldn't cope,” he says. The digital catalog showed what was in the archive, which dates back to the 19th century, and where it could be found.

> "If you ask me something today, I can't find it easily, I have to go down and go through everything.

> “Extremely unfortunate”

> Last fall, the IT department found a system that had no owner or administrator. They shut down the system. After seven months, no one had reported the system missing, so they deleted everything. It was only in September that Åstorp discovered that the archive system was gone.

> “It's obviously very unfortunate,” says Thomas Nilsson, IT manager. Did you make a mistake when you deleted the system?

> “No. In hindsight, it's clear that we should have had different procedures in place, but the technician who did this followed our internal procedures.”

In typical Swedish fashion, there cannot have been a mistake made, because procedures were followed! Or to put it in words that accurately reflect having 25 years of work removed: "Own it, you heartless bastard."

Translated with DeepL.com (free version) [1] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/helsingborg/rasko-digitali...

I'm pretty anti-AI but this isn't really anything to do with AI. The same problem would arise with any online service that you use to hold important data. And it's pretty evil for any such service to have a trap "delete all my stuff with no warning" button.

I recall hearing "she saved everything for her doctoral thesis on that one floppy disk, and then..." warning stories back in the 1980's USA.

Is anyone familiar with current academic culture in Germany, to comment on how (or if) it warns its members about such risks?

Just in case:

https://archive.ph/2026.01.27-112714/https://www.nature.com/...

https://web.archive.org/web/20260127100255/https://www.natur...

Someone in the comments of YT video on that article said that the author most likely breached German privacy laws by submitting their student's homework to US service.

A typical example of Hyrum's Law: ...all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody. It's like how your draft folder feature will be used as a secret messaging app by a general and his mistress, or as Don Norman points out, your flat topped parapet will be used as a table for used cups, or your reliable data store of chats will be used as academic research storage.

But I have to say, quite an incredible choice! ChatGPT released in Nov 2022. This scientist was an early adopter and immediately started putting his stuff in there with the assumption that it would live there forever. Wow, quite the appetite for risk.

But I can't call him too many names. I have a similar story of my own: one thing I once did was ETL a bunch of advertising data into a centralized data lake. We did this through the use of a Facebook App that customers would log in to and authorize ads insights access to. One of the things you need to do is certify that you are definitely not going to do bad things with the data. All we were doing was calculating ROAS and stuff like that: aggregate data. We were clean.

But you do have to certify that you are clean if you even go close to user data, which means answer a questionnaire (periodically). I did answer the questionnaire, but for everyone who has used anything near Meta's business and advertising programs (at the control plane, the ad delivery plane must be stupendous) you know they are anything but reliable. The flaky thing popped up an alert the next day that I had to certify again and it wouldn't go away. Okay, fine, I do need the one field but how about I just turn off the permission and try to work without it. I don't want anyone thinking I'm doing shady stuff when I'm not.

Only problem? If you have an outstanding questionnaire and you want to remove a permission you have to switch from Live to Development. That's fine too, normally, it's a 5 second toggle. Works every time. Except if you have an outstanding questionnaire you cannot switch from Development to Live. We were suddenly stuck, no data, nothing and every client is getting this page about app not approved. And there's nothing to be done but to beg Meta Support who will ignore you. I just resubmitted the app and we waited 24 hours and through the love of God it all came back.

But I was oh-so-cavalier clicking that bloody button! The kind of mistake you make once before you treat any Data Privacy Questionnaire like it's the Demon Core.

The 2nd comma he uses is incorrect. Did he also use ChatGPT for this article?

I frown when people currently trust AI, let alone have been doing so for 2 years already.

Is it deleted though? Last I heard there was a court case or some such that required them retaining all data for a lawsuit, did that go away?

I've built a tool to turn an export of the ChatGPT conversations into Markdown files, ideal for saving them e.g. to Notion: https://chat-capsule.com/

> [...] two years of carefully structured academic work disappeared [...]

> [...] but large parts of my work were lost forever [...]

I wouldn't really say parts of his work were lost. At most the output of an AI agent, nothing more.

If somehow e-mails, course descriptions, lectures, grant applications, exams and other tools, over the period of two years disappeared in an instant, they did not really exist to begin with.

For once, the actual important stuff is the deliverable of these chats, meaning these documents should exist somewhere. If we're being honest everything should be able to be recreated in an instant, given the outputs and if the actual intellectual work was being done by Mr. Bucher.

Does it suck to lose data? Even if just some AI tokens we developed an attachment to? Sure.

Would I have outed myself and my work shamelessly, to the point that clicking a "don't retain my data" option undermines your work like this? Not really.

Ever heard of backup? Multiple copies? Offline?

How can you loose "important work" of multiple years? -- can't be important and how can somebody _expected to become management_ be so incompetent?

"...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." -- stupid: that drive could have died, the building could have burned down, the machine could have been stolen, the data could have been accidentally deleted... and all there was: "a partial" backup.

I mean, that isn't even a scenario where he didn't know about the data ("carefully structured") and discovered it wasn't covered by the backup schema (that would be a _real_ problem) Another problem would be of your churn is so high that backing up becomes a real issue (bandwidth, latency, money, ...). None of that applies.

And yet they reserve a spot in "nature" for such whining and incompetence?

A plant science academic who can't be bothered to back up their work...

If that was the intellectual calibre of the person, I wonder how truly worthwhile the lost work was.

ChatGPT did not lost it.

The user without backups lost their own work.

Simple as that, no argument.

No backups, you the loser.

You might WANT someone else to be responsible but that doesn't change anything.

Hot take: Actual "irreversibly delete x stuff with the next action" is simply too powerful and bad design for most people, and has probably caused considerably more harm than good in the world. It's particularly silly with software, where few reasons exist for this to be an actual thing.

What the average human needs is laws and enforcement, and trust in both.

once upon a time i had a boss who asked for a "super admin" account to "trump" the domain administrators..and a "master key" to decrypt any file , in case the user lost their key.

relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pqF90rstZQ

they are training you conditioning you to never push a button like that ever again.

How dare you not let us steal your data.

The issue is not backup, the issue is that he is publicly and nonchalantly admitting that most of his work for the past years was ai-based, which might or might not constitute fraud given his professional position. Imagine being a student paying thousands over thousands expecting an expert human led instruction just to get this, imagine being a fellow researcher and suddenly being in a situation of not being able to trust this guy's current and past work.

The worst thing is all the people looking at this behaviour as normal and totally acceptable, this is where ai-sloppiness is taking us guys. I hope it's just the ai bros talking in the comments, otherwise we are screwed.

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