The world certainly has changed since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, but a sort of warning had come forth on X a decade prior.
A tweet posted on 5th October 2012 by a user going by the name Marieanne, handle @Meytrullers17, has resurfaced online and is now racking up numbers most accounts never see in their lifetime. The post is about as short as a tweet can get. “Stop chat gpt!!” it reads, nothing more, no context, no elaboration, no follow-up thread explaining what prompted it. It has since pulled in over 75,000 likes, close to 16,000 retweets, and more than 11,000 bookmarks, with over a thousand replies from users trying to make sense of how someone could have typed those exact words a full decade before ChatGPT was even launched.
The timing is what has people stuck. OpenAI didn’t exist as a public-facing company until 2015, and ChatGPT itself only appeared in November 2022, when Sam Altman posted a link to chat.openai.com and told people to go try talking to it. There was no product called “Chat GPT” in 2012, no research paper using that exact naming, nothing in the public record that would explain why a random account would type those two words together, let alone tell people to stop it.
Looking through the rest of the account’s history doesn’t offer much clarity either. Marieanne’s timeline is mostly in Bahasa Indonesia, filled with everyday tweets typical of a Twitter user from that period, and the account appears to have gone quiet sometime in 2013 and never posted again. There’s no bio suggesting any connection to technology, research, or software development. Whoever ran the account seems to have simply stopped using it, the way a lot of Twitter accounts from that era did, long before anyone had a reason to look back at what they’d written.
That combination is exactly what has turned the post into the internet mystery of the week. A dormant account, a decade-old timestamp, and two words that map almost perfectly onto a product that would go on to become one of the most talked-about pieces of software in history. Replies under the tweet range from people calling it a genuine premonition to others pointing out that “GPT” long predates ChatGPT as an abbreviation, referring to a completely different thing back then. Under this theory, “gpt” here might stand for anything from a person’s initials to unrelated slang, and the resemblance to OpenAI’s product name is coincidence dressed up as prophecy by a modern reader scrolling past it with today’s context loaded in their head.
Coincidence theories aside, the tweet fits neatly into a genre that has become common on X over the past few years: old, unrelated posts getting rediscovered and reread through the lens of everything that’s happened since. Screenshots of tweets from the early 2010s asking oddly specific questions, or making throwaway jokes that sound eerily accurate today, tend to go viral precisely because pattern recognition is a powerful thing, and the human brain is very good at finding meaning in noise once it knows what to look for.
Whatever the actual explanation, the tweet is a reminder of just how much ground AI has covered since 2022. ChatGPT went from an experimental product a small team hoped people would try out to a service with hundreds of millions of weekly users, reshaping how people write, code, search, and work in the process. Rivals from Google, Anthropic, and a growing list of Chinese labs have since built their own competing chatbots, and the entire industry now moves at a pace that would have made a 2012 tweet like this one impossible to take seriously, if not for the fact that it somehow exists.
For now, nobody has managed to reach Marieanne for comment, and given the account’s silence since 2013, it seems unlikely anyone will. The tweet remains exactly what it was when it was first posted: two words, an exclamation mark for emphasis, and no explanation at all.