ChatGPT, know thyself

I recently became annoyed by a longstanding bug with ChatGPT’s “archived chats” feature. When you archive a chat, it’s supposed to retain its project label, if it was inside a project when you archived it.

On desktop (but not mobile), the “archived chats” section in the settings has a filter for project. However, for as long as I can remember, all chats have appeared under “No project”—the project filter is always blank. However, clicking the button to unarchive a chat returns it to the correct project. So the project labels are still there, it’s just that the archived chats interface is unable to make use of this information.

I then made my first mistake: I asked ChatGPT for help. It ran through some basic diagnostics, and I confirmed I was unable to fix the problem. Then I asked how I could report a bug. Here was the response:

The official way to report a ChatGPT bug is through OpenAI Support.

1. Go to help.openai.com.
2. Click the chat bubble in the bottom-right corner.
3. Start a new support conversation.
4. Indicate that you’re reporting a ChatGPT bug and describe the problem.

Great! I fired up the AI support chat and announced, “I have a bug report.” The agent walked me through some more testing and we created a thorough bug report. And when it came time to submit that report?

I can’t directly submit internal bug tickets from this chat, but I can help you package a complete report to paste into feedback.

Oh. So I did what I should have done in the first place, which is Google how to submit a bug report for ChatGPT. You actually have to read around a bit, since you will find a lot of answers and many of them are wrong, or at least out of date.

It turns out the way to do this was Help → Report a bug. This was a few weeks ago, and the bug isn’t fixed, of course.

Something else I noted through the process was that both ChatGPT and the support bot constantly referenced accessing archived chats through Settings → Data controls → Archived chats, which works, but more recently they added a direct option through Settings → Archived chats. I know this is just an internal docs update, but guys, you do have to update the docs!

This seems like something that chatbot providers should be able to get right. Models should know their own capabilities and be firmly grounded in their own user interfaces and user experiences. I remember back when native image models were first incorporated into ChatGPT, the model would sometimes insist it did not have the ability to generate images. Image generation would also not work in temporary chats, though the model did not tell you this, and left you on your own to figure out why it wasn’t working.

Actually, image generation still doesn’t work in temporary chats. The model will now tell you to use a regular chat, but it won’t clearly tell you why. From a test I did with GPT-6 Sol just now, asking why image generation wasn’t working in my temporary chat:

It’s a limitation of the tools available in this particular chat, rather than necessarily a restriction on all temporary chats.

Here’s the distinction:

• Temporary chats are designed for privacy. They aren’t saved to your chat history unless you choose to save them, and they aren’t used for model training while temporary.
• Image generation is generally available across ChatGPT plans, including Free.
• This specific session doesn’t have access to the image-generation tool. I can’t verify the exact technical reason.

OpenAI’s temporary chat documentation doesn’t identify image generation as a universally prohibited feature.

So there’s no inherent reason that generating images must be incompatible with temporary chats.

For now, opening a regular chat is the simplest workaround.

ChatGPT, know thyself.

PS. Can we talk about how bad chat history search is? I made the inquiry regarding this bug in the middle of another chat thread, so I couldn’t find it by title. But words that I knew were in the query just would not surface the chat when I was trying to find the original conversation for this post. I had to request my data, wait for the download to be ready, and then use Codex to find it. The funny thing is, ChatGPT itself could tell me when the relevant chat happened, but not the title of the conversation. I didn’t feel like clicking through my chats to find the correct date and section of chat, so I went the full archive search route. Ridiculous.