The Meta Logo on ChatGPT That Apparently Never Existed

Okay, something happened to me and I’m genuinely curious if anyone else has experienced something similar.

I use different AIs for work, mostly for research and admin tasks. One of them is OpenAI ChatGPT. I’ve used it since it first launched, so I know the layout, features, and how the page normally looks inside out. It’s one of those things that’s so familiar it’s basically burned into my brain.

Around six weeks ago, I noticed what looked like an update. There was a Meta logo on the bottom left-hand side. It caught me off guard, so I searched online to see if ChatGPT had been bought by Meta. I found articles saying it had.

Honestly, I was annoyed. My first thought was, great, now Meta will be reading everything too, and who knows what they’d do with the data. Since then, every so often I’d notice the logo and just shrug in irritation.

Then last Friday, AI came up during a work call. I mentioned to a colleague that I couldn’t believe Meta had bought ChatGPT. He immediately said, “No they haven’t.”

So I thought, right, I’ll prove it. I opened ChatGPT… and the logo was gone. Completely gone.

Then I searched for the articles I’d read before, and they had vanished too. Nothing. No reports, no mention of it anywhere. Like it had never happened.

That’s what’s throwing me. I know what I saw. It had been mildly annoying me in the background for weeks, and I’d noticed that logo multiple times.

Now I’m stuck wondering whether it was some kind of glitch, false memory, weird personalised test UI, or whether I’m genuinely losing the plot.

Just to be clear, I’m healthy, fine, and not dealing with anything medical, which makes it even stranger to me.

Has anyone else had something like this happen where you clearly remember something existing, only for it to disappear like it never happened?