Assistant Cannot See and Access My Edits in Canvas

ChatGPT Bugs
1

Hello OpenAI team,

I’m encountering a serious issue when collaborating with ChatGPT in Canvas.

Here’s what’s happening:

• I make changes to the document directly in Canvas (adding or rewriting paragraphs).

• ChatGPT continues to reference the old version of the document as if no changes have occurred.

• When asked to re-read the text, the assistant still fails to reflect my edits.

• It indicated an attempt to use commenting mode, but that failed — ChatGPT was unable to enter this mode.

• Despite this, ChatGPT can submit changes to the Canvas document. So it appears the assistant has write access but not read access to the updated document state.

• The problem occurs consistently both in the ChatGPT app and in the browser.

This results in an inconsistent collaboration experience where ChatGPT overwrites or ignores my contributions. It breaks the flow of co-writing and undermines the purpose of the Canvas tool.

Hypothesis

There appears to be a desynchronization between the editor state and the assistant’s view — possibly a permissions issue, where the assistant can write to Canvas but does not receive the updated content from the client.

Could you please look into this? Canvas is a fantastic concept, but it needs reliable synchronization in both directions to be fully effective.

Thanks in advance for your time and support.

Best regards,

Dimitry Polivaev

3 Likes
2

Same problem here. Cannot use Canvas at all because the server syncing is random and the chat bot is constantly referencing an old version. No matter what features or buttons I attempt to use, at some point it decides it will no longer sync. It even looks like it is syncing with the circular progress bar appearing and spinning a few times near the file name and then disappearing, but still even after that chat is referencing the old version.

Does anyone know any workarounds?

1 Like
3

I am also experiencing this issue. I can’t make any manual edits to the canvas. The pattern matching engine doesn’t seem to register the new edits, even when prompted, e.g. “save and sync this version”, “save my changes”, “remember my changes”, “rescan and save the canvas”, etc.

4

Same issue. Its really annoying, as chatgpt can even overwrite canvas, and when asking to retrieve previous version it is just unable to do it! So all changes manually written through canvas are just non existent for ChatGPT, and lost if you ask it to make a change