ChatGPT testing a mysterious new feature called 'study together'

> It treats messages as disposable

IMHO this is something to lean into. Students should not save chats like references. They should document their findings from the conversations and make sure they can ask again, should the need arrise.

You're pointing out something a lot of people feel but don’t always say out loud — ChatGPT just isn’t built for organizing or managing writing over time. It’s great for brainstorming, writing help, or getting ideas down fast, but once you’ve had a few long conversations, everything starts to blur together. Students end up with dozens or even hundreds of chats, none of which are easy to search, organize, or return to later. It’s like having a giant pile of sticky notes and no folders. Some try to deal with it by copying everything into Google Docs or Notion, but that gets messy fast, especially when it’s done after the fact and without much structure.-

The core issue is that ChatGPT treats each conversation like a throwaway. Even if the content is valuable, it’s not saved like a document — there’s no real sense of “this is my project on climate change” or “this is the story I’m working on.” It’s just one long chat thread, and everything lives in a running timeline. You can rename a chat, sure, but that doesn’t make it feel like a proper file. There’s no version history, no folders, no tags, and no way to mark drafts or track progress. So students end up scrolling endlessly, trying to remember where they talked about that one idea or how they phrased something two weeks ago.-

Some of them are getting creative with workarounds. They paste stuff into apps like Notion or Docs, or save the shareable ChatGPT links in bookmarks or files, but even then it’s easy to lose track. And sometimes those links break or just vanish from memory. It’s frustrating because the content is often really useful — but there’s no good system for keeping it organized.-

What would really help is if ChatGPT had a proper “document mode.” or Artifacts like Anthropoc has. Something where you could start a new piece of writing, name it, organize it into sections, come back to it later, and keep working on it like a real file. You could still get AI help inside the doc, but it would feel more like working in a word processor than chatting in a messaging app. Until that happens, the best move is probably to treat ChatGPT as the rough draft stage and move things into a better tool once the ideas are solid. Asking it to clean up or summarize a full session before copying it out can help a lot too. But yeah — it’s time tools like this started working more like long-term writing partners and less like disposable chat threads.-

In the end of my school time we had those online live word processor (etherpad) where everyone could write on the same document at the same time.

Our notes of that time are amazing and flawless and better than the teaching material itself.

Teachers didn't like it as it benefited those that didn't listen at all, but for those of us who cared this was a major productivity boost.

Imagining an AI as additional user is crazy.

The UX of chat is indeed wrong. And while there have been some integrations into word processors, those don't really work that well either.

I used codex a few weeks ago to do some agentic coding. That actually is a model that could work well for working on groups of documents as well. Treating documents as code here and working to create coherent change sets against those would be a much better way to work with LLMs on writing. I haven't had a chance to try this yet. But using codex to edit a wiki might be the power move here.

> Most of my students struggle to organise or bookmark the hundreds of pages they've created using ChatGPT

I'm struggling to imagine how you could possibly know this (sounds like projection to me), but assuming it's true, please share the strategies that the minority of your students use to manage this.

I made something called ChatKeeper to deal with exactly this.

It syncs your entire ChatGPT history to local markdown files so you can organize, rename, or integrate them with other work however you like. I use it to keep my conversations alongside related notes in Obsidian, but since it's just markdown, you can use any system at all.

I also built it because ChatGPT is a cloud-based service which, as we all know, can vanish, change its UI, or alter its terms at any time, and I wanted control over my own data.

Info, screenshots, & download all at https://martiansoftware.com/chatkeeper for the curious.

(full disclosure: I sell it, but it's cheap, not subscription-based, and has a free trial.)

(nerd disclosure: Reverse-engineering the ChatGPT export format is an ongoing game of whack-a-mole as they continually add new features. The software is currently a CLI but a GUI version is in the works.)

ChatGPT was a well sticked UX experiment. And it doesn't indeed constructed to all types of knowledge processing. I think we'll see a lot of new knowledge processing approaches (from UX point of view) coming years. Like writing was mostly used for accounting (in different eras and areas) before it moved to something else.

i've never even remotely gotten that idea except maybe with GPT's?

studying is what I assume a very large chunk of their userbase is using their service for, and they are trying to compete with the extremely successful Notebook LM

I have zero insight and rarely use their products. And yet, from the outside their pace and ideas amaze me. It is novel terrain, it would be a shame for a company in their position not to explore several avenues, disparate or surprising as they may seem.

Reminds me of WW1 airplane use. We are at the pilot dropping grenade and using pistol to shoot at other pilot stage for technical application I guess. Nobody really knows what to do but everyone is sure trying.

I think it is good, and it fuels innovation. We need to try even strange ideas, because maybe some of them will work.

We used to call it 20% time. Now I guess it's foolish?

ChatGPT is trying out a new feature. I don't get what's fascinating and wild about that.

it's 2025. As another article put it: this is "The Rise of 'Whatever' ". Mediocrity flourishing, grifters exploiting the mediocrity and people too tired or dejected to push back against the mediocrity. AI is a grifters' and coporate's wet dream; it was never about making quality technology to improve everyone's life.

There's many ways to address this, but most solutions fall far outside of tech.

Perhaps but it could just as easily be the feedback that finally breaks up the monopoly that slop has on the world at the moment e.g. react, bullshit jobs etc could all go away. The latter in particular

I don’t know why people get so frustrated here. Studying with chatgpt changed my life. I can compare doing it in early 2010s and now. Cheating? Well yeah, everyone was doing it long before LLMs.

'Don't panic!', right? They're at the forefront of AI application now (by their audience) so it's ok not to know what to do and stumble.

>Review flood of AI gen slop is going to burn out many teachers as it does with programmers hit by PR floods from juniors.

No problem! There is an AI solution for that!

>I worry how these who love to write will get thru the system?

Eventually, I think very poorly. For now it seems that a lot of teachers can kind of tell who has used AI and who hasn't and seem to reward "old school" writers. But the future of communication, in general, seems grim.

Isn't that just a sentence and document upload or screenshot away from any of the current leading LLM-powered chat products?

    You're a brilliant expert at clear, effective, and responsive teaching and explanations of topic X, which I'm studying. Here's my assignment. Draft Y questions to test my understanding and assess my current level