How to use ChatGPT: A beginner’s guide to the most popular AI chatbot

People can have conversations to request stories, ask trivia questions or request jokes among other options. People can also use ChatGPT to ask questions about photos — such as landmarks — and engage in conversation to learn facts and history. In September 2023, OpenAI announced a new update that allows ChatGPT to speak and recognize images.

ChatGPT

In 2025, OpenAI added several features to make ChatGPT more agentic (capable of autonomously performing longer tasks). OpenAI has emplaced additional safeguards to prevent what the company deems to be harmful image generation. In March 2025, OpenAI updated ChatGPT to generate images using GPT Image instead of DALL-E. In October 2023, OpenAI’s image generation model DALL-E 3 was integrated into ChatGPT.

Instacart App Integrated Within ChatGPT (December

In this article, we will explore various ways to contact Costco customer service and provide answers to commonly asked questions. This guide on how to solve a customer service problem will help you resolve most problems with the company. Free users are limited in how many images they can generate per day or in a rolling window (see OpenAI’s support page for current rate limits).

• ChatGPT often stands out because of its versatility and ease of use but mostly from the sheer scale of its user base.
• The company announced a slew of generative AI-powered features to counter OpenAI and Microsoft.
• Thanks to all these capabilities, people use ChatGPT for just about everything now — writing, brainstorming, translating, coding, studying, web searching, and shopping.
• When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions.

Can I make images with ChatGPT?

In November 2025, OpenAI acknowledged that there have been “instances where our 4o model fell short in recognizing signs of delusion or emotional dependency”, and reported that it is working to improve safety. ChatGPT shows inconsistent responses, lack of specificity, lack of control over patient data, and a limited ability to take additional context (such as regional variations) into consideration. ChatGPT can produce correct answers to medical exam and licensing questions, for example the United States Medical Licensing Examination and the Specialty Certificate Examination in Dermatology. The chatbot can assist patients seeking clarification about their health. Many companies adopted ChatGPT and similar chatbot technologies into their product offers.

What are the alternatives to ChatGPT?

Additionally, OpenAI introduced the ability to interact via phone calls through the CHATGPT service, simplifying use for those who prefer voice interaction over typing. You can easily access ChatGPT through a web browser or via its apps on Android and iOS devices. “It understands what they’re saying but actually doesn’t understand what it’s saying. So it’s really a test of human gullibility rather than a test of intelligence.” Equal parts impressive and unsettling, several LLMs have recently passed the Turing Test, where a human evaluator talks to a machine and a human, and if the evaluator cannot distinguish between them, the machine passes. Its latest model, GPT-4.5, currently available to Plus and above tiers in a research preview, shows greater emotional intelligence and supposedly hallucinates less.

• Not only can ChatGPT generate working computer code of its own (in many different languages), but it can also translate code from one language to another, and debug existing code.
• The ChatGPT-generated avatar told the people, “Dear friends, it is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year’s convention of Protestants in Germany”.
• The service gained 100 million users in two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer software application in history.
• Advertising impacts how and where offers appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear and their prevalence).
• This allows ChatGPT to take a sequence of words a user gives it, such as a half-completed sentence, and fill in the blanks with the most statistically probable word given the surrounding context — sort of like auto-complete.
• Indeed, we follow strict guidelines that ensure our editorial content is never influenced by advertisers.

AI agents represent stage three of AGI, enhancing ChatGPT’s reasoning abilities and enabling it to complete a broader range of tasks without human assistance. But it’s OpenAI’s plan to launch AI agents in 2025 that could bring it close to its ultimate goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), where a machine can behave and perform actions the way humans can. According to OpenAI, builders based in the United States will be eligible for payments based on the usage of their custom GPTs. A marketing team, for example, might coach the model on its brand voice guidelines and upload campaign analytics so members of the team can use ChatGPT to spot trends. This can include factual information — like dietary restrictions or relevant details about the user’s business — as well as stylistic preferences like brevity or a specific kind of outline.

GPT-4 can handle more complex tasks compared to GPT-3.5, such as describing photos, generating captions for images and creating more detailed responses up to 25,000 words. The transformer pulls from a significant amount of data to formulate a response. ChatGPT works through its Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which uses specialized algorithms to find patterns within data sequences. It was founded by a group of entrepreneurs and researchers including Elon Musk and Sam Altman in 2015.

The update lets ChatGPT sense and respond to the user’s emotions with response. OpenAI claims GPT-4o is twice as fast and 50% less expensive than GPT-4 when accessed via their API. The user can input instructions and knowledge files in the GPT builder to give the custom GPT context. For example, a user could create a GPT that only scripts social media posts, checks for bugs in code, or formulates product descriptions. Images will be available on all platforms — including apps and ChatGPT’s website.

Addition of E-Commerce Features (April

The company also partnered with PayPal, one of the largest payment processing services in the world, to let users pay for their shopping directly within ChatGPT. With users’ permission, these apps will be able to access their financial data and offer personalized financial insights and recommendations, as well as review credit cards, personal loans and mortgages. At $200 per month, the plan is intended to give users access to OpenAI’s latest offering, the o1 model family. The language models used in ChatGPT are specifically optimized for dialogue and were trained using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). It’s capable of carrying on conversations with human users and generating a wide range of text outputs including recipes, computer code, essays and personal letters. The GPT in ChatGPT stands for “general pre-trained transformer,” which is a language model that uses deep learning and natural language processing to generate natural, human-like text based on a given text input.

Expansion of Advanced Voice Mode to Browsers (November

The most notable limitation of the free version is access to ChatGPT when the program is at capacity. There is also an option to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus for access to GPT-4, faster responses, no blackout windows and unlimited availability. Go to chat.openai.com and then select “Sign Up” and enter an email address, or use a Google or Microsoft account to log in. The ban was lifted a month later after OpenAI made changes to comply with EU data protection regulations.

OpenAI announces the release of its o1 model, which demonstrates complex reasoning capabilities. Advanced voice mode becomes available on web browsers — before, it could only be accessed on mobile and desktop formats. The new features also provide enhanced analytics referral links if they enable their robots.txt files to interact with OpenAI’s site crawler. For example, ChatGPT will offer hints, organize content into sections and create custom lessons and quizzes instead of providing a direct answer to students.

The new ChatGPT Images

In October 2025, OpenAI banned accounts suspected to be linked to the Chinese government for violating the company’s national security policy. In late March 2023, the Italian data protection authority banned ChatGPT in Italy and opened an investigation. Stanford researchers reported that GPT-4 “passes a rigorous Turing test, diverging from average human behavior chiefly to be more cooperative.” A 2023 study reported that GPT-4 obtained a better score than 99% of humans on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. In The Atlantic magazine’s “Breakthroughs of the Year” for 2022, Derek Thompson included ChatGPT as part of “the generative-AI eruption” that “may change our mind about how we work, how we think, and what human creativity is”.

Bing searches can also be rendered through Copilot, giving the user a more complete set of search results. Microsoft does this through the use of its Copilot chatbot. The Plus membership gives unlimited access to avoid capacity blackouts.

The chatbot could then impersonate a trusted person to collect sensitive information or spread vegas casino download disinformation. ChatGPT can also be used to impersonate a person by training it to copy someone’s writing and language style. OpenAI plans to add a watermark to longer text pieces to help identify AI-generated content. To help prevent cheating and plagiarizing, OpenAI announced an AI text classifier to distinguish between human- and AI-generated text.

GPT-4o Mini, the fastest model, is optimized for everyday tasks and available to all users (free-tier users are automatically switched to it when hitting use limits on GPT-4o). All ChatGPT users on the web and iOS/Android now have a Library where images are automatically saved, letting you revisit, reuse or edit them without digging through old chats. GPT-4o’s image generator is now the default in ChatGPT for all users, offering you the ability to generate highly realistic images from simple text prompts. It has also been integrated into educational apps, customer service bots and even Apple products via Apple Intelligence and Siri. According to research conducted by OpenAI and AI safety organization Apollo Research, o1 provides more intelligent answers than GPT-4o while also attempting to deceive users more than any major AI model available. ChatGPT Team lets companies create shared workspaces with settings that apply to all users, as well as the ability to share proprietary data sets.

OpenAI has faced quite a bit of criticism for how students can use ChatGPT to cheat on their homework or exams, and the company.introduced a study mode tool to directly address those concerns. Based on internal evaluations, GPT-5 outperforms its predecessors in multiple areas, including math, coding, visual perception and health knowledge. OpenAI released GPT-5, calling it its “fastest” and “smartest” AI model to date. Following the addition of agentic e-commerce and easy checkout features, OpenAI partnered with Walmart, the country’s largest retailer to enhance digital shopping experiences. OpenAI and Intuit signed a multi-year contract worth more than $100 million, enabling Intuit’s tax and financial services — TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mailchimp — to operate within ChatGPT.

So, despite the guardrails OpenAI has put in place to prevent it, the chatbot still has a tendency to let biases creep into its outputs. Most people know that, just because something is on the internet, that doesn’t make it true. And, because the model is able to produce incorrect information in such an eloquent way, the fallacies are hard to spot and control. Hallucinations can become a huge issue if ChatGPT is being used to, say, write a news article, or ask questions about historical events, or get healthcare advice. ChatGPT’s reliance on data found online makes it vulnerable to false information, which in turn can impact the veracity of its statements. Before using ChatGPT for the first time, you must create an OpenAI account and accept the terms of service.