OpenAI cannot change your email address

By Chris Meah • • 2 min read

Honestly… I find this insane! OpenAI cannot change your email…

I’ve been back and forth with their “support team” (who knows if it’s people or not), and whilst they:

  • have raised a gazillion dollars in funding
  • pay hundreds of millions in salaries and stocks
  • have coding services like Codex to “replace developers”
  • and have AI so intelligent their CEO says he’s close to “curing cancer”…

They simply cannot change the email on your account.

The only way to change your email is “to delete your account and create a new one” 🤔 😂

That is nuts for a number of reasons.

  1. It’s easy - honestly, like super easy functionality that is baked into almost every app ever to have existed, and even vibe coded apps seem to include it without you asking 😂- at least we know ChatGPT wasn’t vibe-coded. I know nothing is really easy… but this is

    You don’t even need the functionality, some sites do this manually on request (still shows poor engineering planning, but still at least they do it)

  2. AI is the future, and it’s only good if you hand it more data. You can build that profile up over years, and it turns out that if you need to change email, it will all be discarded. OpenAI will not transfer it to a new account.

  3. If they leave a basic hole like that in the race to super intelligence, I want you to imagine what other holes there are which are things we know how to solve or implement today, but they haven’t prioritised or couldn’t be bothered to think about right now…

This seems trivial - and, to an extent, I know it is 😂 a mild annoyance to me.

But, it’s symptomatic of a few issues (I’m extrapolating a wee bit):

  • the race mentality
  • the poor engineering at pace
  • the consequences people feel from designs choices they have no power over
  • and the snake oil elements to AI being at a level it obviously isn’t - because even the makers dont trust it enough to say “Hey ChatGPT - change that guy’s email”

Rant over… for now. I’ll be exporting my data and hosting my own custom model trained on it.