I gave ChatGPT my Google Drive ‘digital junk drawer’ — it dug up things I’d forgotten about years ago

This week, OpenAI added Google Drive to your ChatGPT Library.

You could already connect to Google Drive, but now it means you can select a whole Drive folder and ask ChatGPT to look for answers working across all the files it contains.

This can save a lot of time compared to uploading each file individually to ChatGPT’s library and asking ChatGPT to work with it, especially for working with images.

Now they’re effectively all in there already.

Now, I don’t know if you’re anything like me, but I tend to treat the root folder of my Google Drive like a very messy desktop.

I’ve had my Google account for years, and I just chuck files in there without really organizing them into folders unless I really have to.

The result is that it has built up into one big mess of old and new files floating about in a kind of digital soup.

I’m sure there are important things in there that I’m at risk of forgetting about forever.

So, when I heard that ChatGPT can now look at the documents your Drive folder contains and organize them for you too, I was intrigued.

10 years of junk To test this out, I thought I’d ask ChatGPT to connect to my Google Drive and take a look at what it could find: “I've got a load of files in my Google Drive that aren't in folders — go through everything here and identify things I’ve forgotten, unfinished tasks, contradictions, deadlines, duplicate work and anything that looks like it still needs action.

Also suggest how it could be organized and what files should go where.” The result was impressive.

It thought for what felt like about 30 seconds, then came back with some results.

I had to re-authorize it to connect to my Drive a couple of times first, but everything went smoothly.

It turns out that I have a real penchant for saving files called “Untitled document” into Drive.