ChatGPT Me: A mini-app to extract your side of the conversation
Switching from ChatGPT to Claude? Add this to your transfer kit.
I used to be a ChatGPT girl through and through.
And then, after a series of events including annoyance at ChatGPT’s response patterns, a desire to build with Claude Code for personal use cases, and the Pentagon situation, I decided it was time to move to Claude.
Concerns with saying goodbye to ChatGPT
Before I could move to Claude, however, I needed to address two concerns:
I had to make sure I would get along with Claude.
I wanted to be able to access my raw ChatGPT conversations if I needed them.
On getting along with Claude — I used ChatGPT to create an About Me guide and a How to Write with Me guide. (All I did was ask it to write what it knew about me. Then with Claude, I answered clarifying questions and add more detail. Claude wrote the final summaries.)
Between those two guides, I got along with Claude swimmingly. I enjoyed our conversations, and I even appreciated how it would push back on me.
But the second concern kept me gripped to my ChatGPT Plus account. I wanted to be sure I could easily access my raw ChatGPT conversations.
Why would I need my raw ChatGPT data?
A common suggested method to transfer information about you from one AI to another is to ask the original AI to create a summary of you and/or its Memory of you. Then, you give that summary to the new LLM. (For example, here is Anthropic’s guide to importing and exporting memory.)
That can work fine (I did that myself), but there is the possibility of signal loss. You’re relying on the original AI to pick up on nuances about you that may matter for the new AI.
If the new AI had access to your raw data — your actual words and speech patterns — then it can learn from the primary source (you) directly, without you having to recreate it through a new year’s worth of conversations.
The other reason I want my raw data is I share a lot of ideas and brainstorming with AI. I like to mine them for stories, posts, or just learnings about myself. I want to use my own words as much as possible, not an AI summary, and there was a lot of good thinking with the AI that I want to capture.
With data, size matters
But it’s not easy to just transfer your data from one AI to another.
In my case, after frequent daily conversations with ChatGPT for a year, I had over a thousand conversations totaling ~131 MB.
Claude can only accept files up to maybe 30 MB.
And even if Claude could accept the full 131MB, I don’t know that I’d want it to. Claude doesn’t need to read every nitty gritty detail of my conversations with ChatGPT to be able to work with me well.
Despite searching, I couldn’t find an easy out-of-the-box solution that fit my vision for what I wanted to be able to do.
So I made one.
Solutioning with an LLM
I started with Claude Code.
I told it I wanted a way to transfer how I work with ChatGPT to Claude seamlessly, and I wanted to do it through an app I could share with non-developer colleagues. And without blowing through usage and tokens.
Claude Code suggested only extracting conversation titles and the user side of the conversation.
So I told it to go ahead.
It created a simple HTML app that could take in a zip file or json files (the format that ChatGPT conversations were saved in) and return a text file.
It also created a prompt that users could modify and give to Claude along with the conversations text file.
When I tested it, it took my ~131MB down to ~4MB. Only 3% of my ChatGPT data were words I said to it.
As I thought about it, I really liked this solution.
Yes, I appreciated a lot of ChatGPT’s responses. But for the purpose of building a profile of myself to give to a new AI, it made sense to focus on what I said.
After all, it was my words that told the AI what I wanted and how I thought, my words that corrected it (and sometimes yelled at it).
And the results were pretty good.
When I gave the extracted conversations data and prompt to Claude, it produced a beautifully detailed summary and system prompt I could share to its Memory or anywhere else I would want to use the information.
Security checks
Before sharing this app more widely, I asked Claude Code to assess the app for any security holes.
Overall, the app appeared to be low-risk. The data was processed client-side. It didn’t get sent anywhere or to any servers to be processed.
The only risk Claude Code flagged was that the initial version used an outside call related to the zip file processing, and even then the risk was if the third party entity was compromised.
Still, Claude Code suggested a workaround that would keep the app completely local, and I approved it.
I had Claude Code add a note to the app that the data wouldn’t be sent anywhere.
I was ready to send it into the world.
Where to find the app and how to use it
Step 1: Export your ChatGPT data
Before you can use the app, you need to export your data from ChatGPT.
You can do that by going into your Settings in ChatGPT → Export data.
You should receive an email saying your data export has started.
Depending on how much data you have, it may take some time for the export to be ready to download. (Mine took 24 hours.)
When your data export is ready to be downloaded, you’ll received an email.
What you’ll receive is a zip file. Inside it will be one or more json files labeled with “conversation-[number]”. Those are the ones we’ll be working with for ChatGPT Me.
Step 2: Import conversation files into ChatGPT Me
I had 11 conversation files, and I gave all of them to the ChatGPT Me app. Processing only took a few seconds.
After you get your data, you can then upload it to the ChatGPT Me App.
Step 3: Export the conversation text file with the Claude prompt and feed them into Claude to summarize
ChatGPT Me will allow you to download your conversation extract as a text file.
It also provides a detailed prompt that you can give to Claude. You can modify the prompt in ChatGPT Me if you’d like, then download it as a text file.
There is also a short prompt you can then paste directly into Claude to direct it to use the conversation and prompt files to create your summary.
Step 4: Use the summary wherever you want Claude to know you!
If you use the prompt provided, Claude will output a detailed summary of you covering each topic as well as a short system prompt.
At that point, you can work with Claude to modify the output as you see fit. Because you shared the raw conversations file, you can also have Claude do deeper dives to augment the initial summary.
Note, in my testing, it appeared as though Claude sampled conversations rather than fully reviewed the entire file.
That can be a good thing — the entire conversation set may not be needed to get a whole picture of how you work, and it would be better not to waste resources if you can help it.
However, if you’re finding that the summary isn’t rich enough, you can direct Claude to dig more into the areas that matter to you.
You can also combine this output with other memory extracts you’ve created using other migration methods. (I share some of my favorites below.)
Once you’re happy with your summary, you can use it anywhere you want Claude to access it, such as in its Memory feature or Project Instructions.
A demo of ChatGPT Me
Here is a demo of how to use ChatGPT Me, how to give Claude the conversation and prompt files, and how Claude creates a summary based on that information.
Under the hood
If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of ChatGPT Me, you can find the code for it on GitHub here: https://github.com/alyssafuward/chatgpt-me
It’s basically a simple HTML app, so it was very easy to host and for free. Currently it lives on GitHub Pages. Any time I make a change to the code, push it to GitHub, and merge it to main, the app will automatically update as well.
Alternative methods for ChatGPT extraction
ChatGPT Me is only one tool in a growing toolkit to help people make the switch to Claude and carry your context with you.
Here are a few of my favorite guides, and how they compare to each other and ChatGPT Me.
First, there is Anthropic’s official guide to transferring memory from one LLM to another. This involves asking the source LLM (like ChatGPT) to summarize its Memory, which you can then port to Claude’s Memory. I was surprised at how out of date my ChatGPT Memory was, so that felt less helpful to me.
Daria Cupareanu created a web app that lets you ingest your raw conversation files among other information about you to create a summary you can share with Claude.
Nicolle Weeks has also written a highly detailed migration guide to move from ChatGPT to Claude that includes porting your frameworks, prompts, and voice.
All of these are great solutions and meet slightly different needs. They can also be used all together, which is the beauty of AI. It can take in information from different sources and create one seamless document that incorporates inputs from every which where.
Here is a comparison of these solutions side-by-side.
There is no one right way to use AI, and we’re all exploring ways that work for us to use it.
Depending on your goal, you can find a solution for it. Or build one yourself!
A 30-minute solution that felt too simple
I’ve worked with Claude Code constantly for the last few months, but at work on work projects, and primarily in the realm of data analysis and creating dashboards.
This is the first app I built with Claude Code for my own personal use.
Despite being familiar with Claude Code and what it can produce, I still watched with awe while Claude Code built ChatGPT Me.
And it did the job I wanted it to do. It created the plan. I guided it, but I didn’t really need to do too much.
And in less 30 minutes, including security checks, testing, and having Claude Code build the profile, I had a good working version.
I almost felt embarrassed about how simple it was to make the app that I thought about not sharing it.
But I want to build in public, and I want to show you that you can build apps, too.
And they don’t have to be flashy if they get the job done.
In a future post, I’ll share in more detail the conversation I had with Claude Code to make the app. If you have any questions that you’d want me to address, please DM me or leave me a comment below!
Say the obvious part out loud
As we all figure out how to make the most of AI, one skill is emerging as the most important —
More than a mirror: AI as a bridge for interconnection between me, you, and everyone else
I told ChatGPT I hated my latest newsletter draft.
Such a great idea! I'm sure this will be a very useful tool for many people switching to Claude.
Forwarding this to friends who I convinced to move to Claude!😃🩷🦩