ChatGPT now lets you search old chats in the web app

ChatGPT knows you had a chat a while back with now-vital information, and it's now making it much easier for you to find it.

Announced on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday, OpenAI has added a tool to its conversational AI platform that makes searching your chat history much more convenient. Now, when you open ChatGPT in the web app, you'll spot a magnifying glass icon in the top left, where you can trawl the depths of your conversations for keywords and phrases.

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According to OpenAI, "Plus and Team users will have access within the day. Enterprise and Edu users will have access in one week. Free users will start getting access throughout the next month."

When I asked ChatGPT itself for more information about the new history search feature, the AI bot said the feature was "designed to save time and keep information organized" and "lets you quickly locate information from past chats, making it easier to revisit helpful responses or continue a conversation from where you left off."

According to ChatGPT, the AI searches through your past conversations for your chosen terms, and "will return relevant conversations from your history that match those terms." You can click on a result to open that chat. ChatGPT suggested possible uses as tracking ongoing projects, learning and study, and "brainstorming".

The news comes months after ChatGPT has faced a fair bit of criticism for chat history data storage; in May, Mashable reported about ChatGPT saving user chat history, even if you'd opted out of sharing your data to train the model. When I asked ChatGPT about the new history search feature today, it provided information about privacy, control, and data visibility, saying, "Only you have access to your conversation history, and OpenAI doesn’t use these conversations for training unless you explicitly consent by opting in."

Additionally, ChatGPT said, "If you prefer, you can turn off chat history altogether in the settings. When history is off, conversations will not be saved or searchable."

Notably, there are some things ChatGPT might not want you to be able to retrieve from the archives, considering the AI chatbot has been accused of sharing election debate misinformation, being ableist toward job applicants with disabilities, and exposing trade secrets shared by Samsung workers using the platform. Being able to easily find receipts might cause more of a headache for the company than it seems.

We've also reported about people using ChatGPT to argue with their partners, so adding the ability to quite literally dredge up the past through searching chat history could be potential fight kindling for relationships — perhaps there are some things that shouldn't be searchable.