what to know
- ChatGPT automatically saves your conversations. Click on New Chat , enter the prompt and it will appear in the list on the left.
- Open a saved conversation: click its name. Or click the pencil to rename the conversation, or use the trash can to delete.
- Server congestion and other issues may prevent ChatGPT from saving your conversations.
This article explains how to save a ChatGPT conversation, including how to rename, delete, and copy conversation threads.
ChatGPT works using a conversation thread, which includes the original prompt used to start the conversation, the initial response from the artificial intelligence (AI), any subsequent prompts sent to fine-tune the response, and the AI's subsequent response. These threads allow you to divide the different tasks you perform with ChatGPT, access them later, and even pick up old conversations to fine-tune them further.
Here's how to save a conversation in ChatGPT:
After logging into ChatGPT, click + New Chat .
Enter your prompt in the input field and click the send button (it looks like a paper airplane).
Your new chat thread will initially appear as "New Chat" in the left column.
When ChatGPT responds to your prompt, it automatically renames the chat thread to a name related to your prompt.
To change the name, move your mouse over the chat thread and click the pencil icon.
Enter a new name for the chat thread to help you find it in the future.
To open an old chat thread that you saved in the past, click its name in the list.
The old ChatGPT thread will open, allowing you to read it or submit a new tip to continue the conversation.
ChatGPT does not have any built-in functionality to save conversations locally, backup conversations, or share conversations. You can copy ChatGPT replies and prompts to save or share using the app of your choice.
Copying and pasting does not preserve the formatting of the conversation, but it does provide a local copy that you can use as a reference in case your old conversations are lost due to issues with the ChatGPT or OpenAI servers.
Here's how to save a ChatGPT thread locally:
On the ChatGPT website, click on the title of a saved chat in the list of old chats on the left side of the website.
Highlight the text you want to copy by clicking and dragging to select it.
Right-click the highlighted text and click Copy .
You can now paste the ChatGPT conversation into a text document using the app of your choice, paste it into an email, share it via social media, or do anything else you want.
ChatGPT conversations are saved by default, but you can delete conversations you no longer need. You can also delete all conversations at once. Delete removes one or more conversations from your topic list, which is useful if you create a lot of topics and have trouble keeping track.
It won't necessarily remove content from the OpenAI servers, but it can tidy up your interface.
Deleting a conversation is permanent, so make sure you really want to delete it before deleting it.
Here's how to delete a ChatGPT conversation:
On ChatGPT's website, click on the title of the saved chat that you want to delete.
Click the trash can icon.
Click the check icon to confirm.
If you clicked on the wrong conversation, select the x icon to cancel.
To delete everything immediately, click Clear Conversation .
Select Confirm Clear Conversation to complete the deletion.
ChatGPT is a product of OpenAI, the company that also created the DALL-E AI image generator. The company has partnered with Microsoft to bring ChatGPT to the Bing search engine, in which Microsoft has a large stake but OpenAI is technically an independent company.
The “GPT” part stands for “Generative Pretrained Transformer” and describes a specific type of language model. These models respond based on large amounts of data that research programmers use to "train" it.
