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Comment by m_rpn | Hacker News Reader

First rule of the world: "if you don't understand the implications, don't do it".

How much are we willing to justify every wrong behaviour possible?

You mean toggling the data setting? It's on the program to make implications visible. That's a big part of design for usability. It's possible ChatGPT did that and the user was unexpectably dense, it's more likely the implications were not properly explained/shown. That's why you add undo functionality, which the user even tried to find. Here, given the legal component, an undo available for a short time frame seems like a good fit.

But your comment could equally be about the fact of using chatGPT in the first place for the job, that I wouldn't justify at all.

Usability, UI, that's not the point, my question is just how is it possible that an esteemed academic professional doesn't understand that touching anything that deals with "data" on a service like ChatGPT could possibly result in consequences? And how is it possible that we have started to justify every careless and sloppy behaviour ever? Better not justify sloppiness.

That's absolutely usability. To show what will happen if something like "data" on a service like ChatGPT is touched, to prevent outcomes the user did not want, to prevent accidental data loss through guidance and safeguards. It's usually not sloppyness when users run into those situation, but bad program design. Maybe also here: ChatGPT now does not remove the old interactions when the data consent setting is changed, and shows prominent warnings before the removal of interaction threads, which is a separate option, according to a german article about this (https://www.notebookcheck.com/ChatGPT-Professor-verliert-zwe...). It is likely this was changed in the meantime, to better the usability.

Or the user really was surprised that deleting all interactions meant deleting all interactions. Then your position is a bit more understandable, but even then - mistakes happen and an undo would still be good.

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