Professor Reports That OpenAI Deleted His Work, World Laughs in His Face

We’ve all been there. We lost some part of our digital life, perhaps because we accidentally deleted it or a system failed us in some way. Well, a professor in Germany lost a large amount of work recently after changing his settings with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, writing about it this week in Nature. But social media users don’t seem very sympathetic. In fact, they’re now repeatedly dunking on him for using AI in the first place.

Marcel Bucher, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne, writes that he signed up for a paid ChatGPT plan two years ago and found the AI tool tremendously useful.

“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,†wrote Bucher.

He acknowledged that ChatGPT, like all large language models, could be inaccurate, but liked it because it could remember the context of conversations, and he valued the “continuity and apparent stability of the workspace.†Then he tinkered with the settings for data consent.

From Nature:

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.

Bucher went on to explain that he initially thought it was a mistake and assumed that he would be able to recover his years of data. He reinstalled the app, tried different browsers, and tinkered with more settings. But nothing worked. He then tried to contact OpenAI but was predictably met with an AI agent, which couldn’t help him. He eventually was able to contact a human, but they couldn’t help him either. The data was gone.

Again, this is the kind of story that would’ve likely elicited some sympathy in another era. But here in 2026, when AI is often seen as a slop machine for generating wrong answers and child sexual abuse material, there are more than a few people who will revel in someone losing all their AI chats.

“Amazing sob story: ‘ChatGPT deleted all the work I hadn’t done’,†one Bluesky user wrote.

“Maybe next time, actually do the work you are paid to do *yourself*, instead of outsourcing it to the climate-killing, suicide-encouraging plagiarism machine,†wrote another another. Others floated the possibility that the essay in Nature wasn’t even written by Bucher.

“This is the dumbest shit I’ve read in a quite a while,†a Bluesky user wrote. “(But, in his defense: there is no particular reason to assume that the guy who published this actually wrote it himself.)â€

Bucher did make the point that he was being encouraged to use AI in his work, and there’s validity to that complaint. Large institutions are telling their workers to incorporate AI more often under the theory that it’s some kind of inevitable future:

We are increasingly being encouraged to integrate generative AI into research and teaching. Individuals use it for writing, planning and teaching; universities are experimenting with embedding it into curricula. However, my case reveals a fundamental weakness: these tools were not developed with academic standards of reliability and accountability in mind.

If a single click can irrevocably delete years of work, ChatGPT cannot, in my opinion and on the basis of my experience, be considered completely safe for professional use.

It remains to be seen whether generative AI will truly transform the workplace in ways that actually matter, especially as workers are more skeptical and bosses try to insist on its use. Whatever happens, there will likely be plenty of AI skeptics around to celebrate when someone loses a bunch of work.