A professor lost two years of 'carefully structured academic work' in ChatGPT because of a single setting change: 'These tools were not developed with academic standards of reliability in mind'

If you've ever accidentally deleted a work file only to realise you never made any backups, prepare to pour one out with me. Marcel Bucher, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne, has written a column for Nature entitled "When two years of academic work vanished with a single click". Ouch.

Bucher explains that he'd been using OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus service as an assistant for a number of tasks, including writing emails, structuring grant applications, revising publications...