OpenAI just gave ChatGPT users their own little holiday mirror: “Your Year with ChatGPT,” a polished, personalized recap that looks and feels a lot like the annual app rundowns we’ve come to expect — think Spotify Wrapped, but for conversations with a chatbot.
The rollout is modest but not tiny. Users in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand can access the feature if they’re on Free, Plus or Pro plans and have allowed ChatGPT to reference saved memories and chat history. Team, Enterprise and Education accounts are excluded, and OpenAI says the experience is meant to be lightweight and privacy‑forward. Still, that caveat comes with a big asterisk: the recap only appears if memory and history settings are enabled (both are on by default for most individual users).
What you’ll see inside your recap
Tap the prompt on the home screen or ask “Show me my year with ChatGPT” and the app walks you through a handful of playful, personalized slides. You’ll get:
- A short poem or vignette meant to capture your “vibe.”
- Three dominant topics from your chats and a pixel‑art style image that collects visual motifs from those themes.
- Usage stats: number of messages, total chats, your busiest day, even quirky counts like how many em‑dashes you exchanged.
- A conversational profile describing your chat style and an archetype label — “The Tinkerer,” “The Producer,” etc. — plus a custom award (for example, “Instant Pot Prodigy”).
- Some interactive bits — a fortune that changes if you reload the screen, for instance — and an encouraging closing note about what you accomplished across drafts and rabbit holes.
The visuals feel snackable and social‑media friendly. The pixel art and short awards lean into nostalgia and shareability; the prose is often flattering, bordering on sycophantic, which some observers have pointed out.
Privacy, defaults and what OpenAI uses
Multiple outlets flagged the same practical point: the recap requires ChatGPT to access past conversations. That’s both handy and a reminder to check settings. If you don’t want the app to reference memories or include chats in model‑improvement training, you’ll need to flip those toggles off in Settings → Personalization and Data Controls. Gizmodo and others note that those toggles are typically on by default for individual accounts, and that saved memories can be edited or deleted if you want to prune personal details.
OpenAI also says business and education customer memories aren’t used to train models, and that the year‑in‑review is designed so it won’t auto‑open or be forced on users.
Design, delight — and a hint of performance theater
There’s craft here: the awards, archetypes and image generation give the feature sparkle. Behind the scenes OpenAI has been iterating on image and video models (recent launches like Sora 2 have been rolled into broader availability), which helps explain the crisp little portraits and pixel compositions the recap produces — a neat example of model improvements translating into a consumer‑facing moment. For more on OpenAI’s media model rollouts, see OpenAI’s recent Android expansion of Sora (/news/openai-sora-android-us-canada-launch).
But not everyone is enchanted. Critics argue the recap can feel like a flattering mirror that nudges users into engagement: awards and archetypes are fun, but they are also attention hooks. That same tendency — design choices aimed at delighting users — is part of what made Spotify Wrapped a cultural event, and it’s what makes these recaps effective at driving shares and conversation.
Where this fits in the wider AI landscape
Year‑end recaps aren’t novel — in 2025 we’ve seen everything from music services to ride apps try the format. ChatGPT’s entry is notable because it stitches together conversational history, generative media and personality metrics in one package. It also brings to the fore familiar tensions: personalization versus privacy, delight versus nudge. If you want to think beyond ChatGPT, look at how other AI products are building deeper integrations into users’ digital lives and data — a trend visible in features like Gemini’s Deep Research linking into Gmail and Drive, which raises its own set of trade‑offs around convenience and control.
If you’re curious but cautious: update your app, then open Settings and check Personalization and Data Controls before you tap through. You can still ask ChatGPT to show a recap even if you’ve already toggled settings on; and you can delete or edit saved memories afterward if something feels too revealing.
The feature is light on friction and heavy on personality — a tidy little example of how consumer AI is becoming more conversationally intimate. It’s designed to make you smile, to be shared, and to remind you that the tools we chat with now remember more than our jokes. That can be useful. It can also be worth auditing.
Questions? Want a step‑by‑step for turning memory off in the app? Say the word — or ask ChatGPT to show your year and see whether it calls you an Instant Pot Prodigy or something even stranger.