ChatGPT Business and Enterprise users cannot export workspace chats through OpenAI's standard data export option, but a new free tool offers an unofficial way to retrieve their accessible chat records. Scrapemychats, from freelance journalist Conrad Quilty-Harper, makes it possible for those ChatGPT subscribers to retain a copy of their chat sessions before leaving for other AI pastures.
Quilty-Harper just published it this week on GitHub. “I made the stupid decision to upgrade from a personal account to a Business one a while back as they prompted, and for some reason OpenAI doesn't let you export the data easily,” Quilty-Harper explained to The Register in an email. OpenAI says right on its help page about chat exports that Free, Plus, Pro, and some Edu customers can export their chats, but Business and Enterprise workspaces don't have access to that export option.
No justification is given (we asked and didn’t hear back), though keeping top-tier subscribers locked in is a distinct possibility. OpenAI does offer Enterprise admins access to workspace conversation logs through its complex Compliance Platform, but the platform retains those logs for only 30 days unless customers archive them elsewhere. ChatGPT Business users, however, have no simple way to create a local archive of their workspace chats without a tool like scrapemychats.
Never fear, however, as scrapemychats will be able to liberate those messages - at least until OpenAI closes the loophole it exploits. “I expect OpenAI will stop this from working shortly after you write about it,” Quilty-Harper predicted in our exchange. “It's probably a breach of their terms of service.
But hey, their entire business model is based around scraping copyrighted material. This just allows you to get the content you wrote or pasted or created (and generated) back.” Until that happens, scrapemychats is available on GitHub for you to snag a copy of those chats before you close up shop at the House of Altman.
The app works through a logged-in browser session and, as explained in the GitHub README, stores accessible ChatGPT conversations - including available file attachments - in a local archive with an email-like HTML interface that can be opened offline in a browser. The data is stored separately from the interface, too, and Quilty-Harper tells us the stored chats can be used however one likes.
It's not a headless tool, mind you: ChatGPT's bot protection prevents it from running in one. What that means in practice is that scrapemychats navigates through your ChatGPT account, opens your conversations, and stores the conversation data and attachments loaded through the browser. That also means it moves slowly, as OpenAI tends to throttle anything that makes too many requests too quickly.
Downloading a 600-chat archive will take “a few hours,” the README states. It can be resumed if you need to pause it, though. Installation can be done via the command line, and all the necessary steps to get it running are included in the GitHub writeup.
“I would quite like to know the reason why ChatGPT doesn't make it easy for paying customers to get access to their data,” Quilty-Harper told us. “I have my suspicions, and as a freelance reporter I'd love it if someone who works there could tell me if they know about this friction.”
Originally published at theregister.com
