4 ms·

Most of my students struggle to organise or bookmark the hundreds of pages they've created using ChatGPT. It gets messy. Some copy & paste everything into Googl

by pyman 1y ago

Most of my students struggle to organise or bookmark the hundreds of pages they've created using ChatGPT. It gets messy. Some copy & paste everything into Google Docs. Others use custom apps or save the shareable URLs in their browser or text files, even though those links sometimes disappear over time. The problem is, ChatGPT wasn't designed to be a proper writing or word processor tool. It treats messages as disposable, not like saved documents you can return to, structure, or modify easily.

tossandthrow 1y ago
> 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.
- pyman 1y ago
  I was saying the same thing a year ago, but now more students are using it and creating all sorts of documents: summaries of transcripts and articles, flashcards, quizzes, mock exams and interviews, research, role plays, study and fitness plans, tutorials, how-to guides, and more. They even turned homework into riddle-based mystery games.
  - pyman 1y ago
    The most tech-savvy students built their own publishing system using ChatGPT. It lets others turn their message into a JSON object, tag it, and add it to the system, which then gets published and shared with everyone using Google Docs. The prompt they use to export the ChatGPT messages is: --- Turn the following text into JSON format. The JSON should have three fields: "title", "prompt", and "data". The "title" should be self-generated, based on the main idea or theme of the input text. The "prompt" should be the exact prompt used to generate the "data" section. The "data" should be in markdown format, and it must include the original prompt as a section inside the markdown, followed by the input text. Keep any formatting like headings, bold, italics, and lists. --- I asked them to include the prompt to preserve context so others can understand their thinking process and the goal behind the message.
    - intended 1y ago
      How are people handling the job of reading all the actual output?
      - pyman 1y ago
        One student built a page that lets others convert the JSON to a Google Doc and upload it to a shared Google Drive
    - iwontberude 1y ago
      What is tech savvy about this?
      - pyman 1y ago
        Sorry, I wasn’t clear. One student built a page that lets others convert the JSON to a Google Doc and upload it to a shared Google Drive
  - tossandthrow 1y ago
    That is reasonable - it is likely my understanding of ChatGPT that needs to be correct. It is not a chat interface but an assets / applications builder. Under that view, it is reasonable to save links to applications.
- soco 1y ago
  Or the AI tool, some AI tool, could sift through your conversation and document the findings, ignore the ones you challenged, and generate exactly that final revision with everything you learned in the conversation. No, I don't know how either, so for the time being I'm also writing down stuff in an external document.
Bluestein 1y ago
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.-
- the_other 1y ago
  Wouldn't an "LLM-enabled word processor" be a better UX, and a better factoring of the resources? Rather than expecting the LLM companies to also provide the best UX for every LLM use case, surely it's better to have tailored applications and OSs (and all the domain expertise that comes with them) managed by people/companies/teams that want to specialise in those domains. Copilot, but for essays & articles.
herbst 1y ago
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.
- iwontberude 1y ago
  I don’t find interacting with AI in this way rewarding at all. I don’t trust it because it lies constantly, why would I want even more work to validate my learning material? I don’t get the point of getting things done poorly and then having to clean it up. Just do it yourself and get good results? Or maybe that’s just not realistic to expect of people anymore.
  - herbst 1y ago
    Formatting, logical information filling (I'd just write one osi layer, the ai the rest) I see what you mean. But it depends on how you use it
jillesvangurp 1y ago
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.
- barrenko 1y ago
  A good diff format is all you need.
scoot 1y ago
> 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.
martylamb 1y ago
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 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.)
- 4b11b4 1y ago
  Cool but the update structure requiring a new license after a year would turn me away. Could I at least pay a reduced rate for later updates since I already bought the full license..?
  - martylamb 1y ago
    That's completely reasonable. Honestly, ChatKeeper hasn't been around long enough for that to come up yet. My intention was to keep it priced so that's not an issue, but perhaps I did not succeed there. I will seriously consider that - thanks for the suggestion!
ruslan_sure 1y ago
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.

by pyman 1y ago

tossandthrow 1y ago

> 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.

pyman 1y ago
I was saying the same thing a year ago, but now more students are using it and creating all sorts of documents: summaries of transcripts and articles, flashcards, quizzes, mock exams and interviews, research, role plays, study and fitness plans, tutorials, how-to guides, and more. They even turned homework into riddle-based mystery games.
- pyman 1y ago
  The most tech-savvy students built their own publishing system using ChatGPT. It lets others turn their message into a JSON object, tag it, and add it to the system, which then gets published and shared with everyone using Google Docs. The prompt they use to export the ChatGPT messages is: --- Turn the following text into JSON format. The JSON should have three fields: "title", "prompt", and "data". The "title" should be self-generated, based on the main idea or theme of the input text. The "prompt" should be the exact prompt used to generate the "data" section. The "data" should be in markdown format, and it must include the original prompt as a section inside the markdown, followed by the input text. Keep any formatting like headings, bold, italics, and lists. --- I asked them to include the prompt to preserve context so others can understand their thinking process and the goal behind the message.
  - intended 1y ago
    How are people handling the job of reading all the actual output?
    - pyman 1y ago
      One student built a page that lets others convert the JSON to a Google Doc and upload it to a shared Google Drive
  - iwontberude 1y ago
    What is tech savvy about this?
    - pyman 1y ago
      Sorry, I wasn’t clear. One student built a page that lets others convert the JSON to a Google Doc and upload it to a shared Google Drive
- tossandthrow 1y ago
  That is reasonable - it is likely my understanding of ChatGPT that needs to be correct. It is not a chat interface but an assets / applications builder. Under that view, it is reasonable to save links to applications.
soco 1y ago
Or the AI tool, some AI tool, could sift through your conversation and document the findings, ignore the ones you challenged, and generate exactly that final revision with everything you learned in the conversation. No, I don't know how either, so for the time being I'm also writing down stuff in an external document.

Bluestein 1y ago

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.-

the_other 1y ago
Wouldn't an "LLM-enabled word processor" be a better UX, and a better factoring of the resources? Rather than expecting the LLM companies to also provide the best UX for every LLM use case, surely it's better to have tailored applications and OSs (and all the domain expertise that comes with them) managed by people/companies/teams that want to specialise in those domains. Copilot, but for essays & articles.

herbst 1y ago

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.

iwontberude 1y ago
I don’t find interacting with AI in this way rewarding at all. I don’t trust it because it lies constantly, why would I want even more work to validate my learning material? I don’t get the point of getting things done poorly and then having to clean it up. Just do it yourself and get good results? Or maybe that’s just not realistic to expect of people anymore.
- herbst 1y ago
  Formatting, logical information filling (I'd just write one osi layer, the ai the rest) I see what you mean. But it depends on how you use it

jillesvangurp 1y ago

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.

barrenko 1y ago
A good diff format is all you need.

scoot 1y ago

> 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.

martylamb 1y ago

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 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.)

4b11b4 1y ago
Cool but the update structure requiring a new license after a year would turn me away. Could I at least pay a reduced rate for later updates since I already bought the full license..?
- martylamb 1y ago
  That's completely reasonable. Honestly, ChatKeeper hasn't been around long enough for that to come up yet. My intention was to keep it priced so that's not an issue, but perhaps I did not succeed there. I will seriously consider that - thanks for the suggestion!

ruslan_sure 1y ago

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.