OpenAI wants ChatGPT to remember your workday better than you do. The newly introduced Computer History feature, currently rolling out in the ChatGPT desktop app for macOS, turns your clicks, keystrokes, web browsing and more into a searchable timeline.<\/p>\n
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The idea is to make ChatGPT more of an intelligent assistant. It can help you resume unfinished work, locate relevant files or conversations and automate workflows. If you lose the thread of what you were doing before lunch, ChatGPT can reconstruct it for you. Whether you want an AI logging all that activity is a separate question \u2014 one that\u2019s in opposition to Apple\u2019s privacy positioning.<\/p>\n
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\nWhat ChatGPT Computer History actually does
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As agentic AI takes off, all the big AI companies are trying to transform their offerings from passive chatbots into active AI agents that can get things done. The new Computer History feature is a step toward agentic AI that\u2019s deeply embedded in the user\u2019s personal context and workflow. It provides ChatGPT with a \u201cprovenance layer\u201d: a record of what the user was doing, where they did it, and how they did it. This context should make ChatGPT\u2019s assistance more proactive and automations more personalized.<\/p>\n
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Computer History<\/a> replaces Chronicle<\/a>, the research preview OpenAI<\/a> launched for Codex back in April. Chronicle worked by taking screenshots, but Computer History throws out that approach.<\/p>\n
Instead, it records interaction events and does not capture your screen or audio. Clicks, types, keyboard shortcuts, and app switches are captured using macOS<\/a>\u2019s accessibility system instead of a camera pointed at your screen.<\/p>\n
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