Not going to lie, ChatGPT’s new year end recap made me feel a bit ashamed

ChatGPT has now rolled out its own end-of-year wrap-up here in the US and a few other select regions, taking obvious inspiration from services like Spotify. The new “Your Year with ChatGPT” feature is available for free, Plus, and Pro plans that have the “reference saved memories” and “reference chat history” options turned on and have used the service regularly enough to make it worth it.

The experience works a bit differently from a typical ChatGPT conversation, as it’s divided into several pages that start with “your year in poetry”. This is a brief poem that is supposed to highlight your year. Mine talked about prepaid services, towers, editing, alternate timelines, dinosaurs, and many other things, all curated into a poem that made as little sense as my usage history with ChatGPT in the first place.

As I dived in, ChatGPT had several insights, including big themes I explored that year.  In my case, this included Creative Worlds, What-Ifs, and Reflection and Routines. For people who are less odd than myself, the themes are probably more focused on work and productivity, I’d wager.

Recently, I wrote about how ChatGPT had become a major timesuck for me, similar to how many endlessly scroll through social media. As part of an effort to reduce my AI use, I have largely stayed away from ChatGPT Plus over the last few weeks and used free LLMs for basic stuff on the rare instances where I needed it. That said, I heard about the wrap-up and was curious enough that I had to check it out. It was the third page in the recap that really made me weep for my wasted life, though.

I won’t get into all my chat stats, but let’s just say I am in the top 1% of all messages sent. The number of messages is also insanely high, but I want to maintain the little self-respect remaining here, and I’ll leave the number out of it. I’m sufficiently ashamed of it, don’t worry.

As for my Chat Style? According to ChatGPT, I “speak with thoughtful curiosity, mixing realism, imagination, and humor while exploring ideas deeply yet conversationally across science, history, and daily life.” In other words, it thinks I’m a nerd (correct read I’d say).

That’s far from all the stuff that the recap goes through. For example, it awarded me stuff like “Most Likely to Turn a Phone Plan into a Philosophy,” apparently. It also gives you insights into your user archetype, generates a photo that sums up your experience with it, and makes a prediction for the next year. And of course, you can ask it questions and further insights about the year as well.

If you use ChatGPT regularly, I definitely recommend checking it out. It’s a fun little time waster. At the very least, you might realize you need to get outside more and stop hiding in your office, or at least that was my realization.