ChatGPT Learns to Watch You: The New Computer History Feature Remembers Clicks and Keystrokes

The ChatGPT desktop app for macOS has picked up a feature with a telling name: Computer History. It tracks what you do on your computer and how you do it, and from that data it builds a timeline of your actions. ChatGPT and Codex can then draw on this feed whenever the user frames a new request.

The idea is for the assistant to understand your work habits: to suggest automating routine operations and even to pick up tasks abandoned halfway through. In a demo clip, OpenAI staffer Dominik Kundel shows the app finding the last document he edited, checking whether it had been sent to colleagues over Slack, and summing up how his morning went.

Not Recall, but Unsettling All the Same

The comparison to Windows' infamous Recall feature is impossible to miss, and The Verge doesn't shy away from it: the result feels similar, but without the “creepy screenshots” — though, as the outlet notes, it's still a little unnerving. Unlike Microsoft's solution, which relied on constant screen captures, Computer History, according to OpenAI, doesn't record images, video or audio, and logs only “events.”

OpenAI separately stresses that the feature is opt-in: it's off by default and turned on manually, not the other way around. Users can exclude specific apps and sites from monitoring, and can also delete records already collected for finer control. Ari Weinstein, a product and engineering manager at OpenAI, said on X that Computer History will automatically ignore the contents of incognito and private-browsing tabs.

Even so, the very idea of an assistant that methodically logs your every action for the sake of “more useful” prompts is one more reminder of how thin the line is between convenient automation and surveillance. OpenAI has tried to distance itself from Recall's reputational troubles — no screenshots, opt-in activation and the ability to delete data — but the fundamental question remains: are users ready to hand an AI a detailed chronicle of their workday in exchange for automation.

Source: The Verge