With the US midterm election just a week away (Nov. 3), it’s important to avoid deepfake images meant to spread misinformation among voters.

I’ve come across far too many instances of older folks in the comments section falling for obvious attempts at political deepfakes. That trend got so bad during the 2024 US election that the “Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections” was enacted, with companies such as Anthropic, Meta, Google and Microsoft signing on to uphold its mission to introduce “a set of commitments to deploy technology countering harmful AI-generated content meant to deceive voters.”

Part of that accord’s mission statement is as follows: “Digital content addressed by the accord consists of AI-generated audio, video, and images that deceptively fake or alter the appearance, voice, or actions of political candidates, election officials, and other key stakeholders in a democratic election, or that provide false information to voters about when, where, and how they can vote.”

OpenAI is another one of the major tech companies that signed on to support the accord’s attempts to fight back against election deepfakes. And in 2026, it introduced a pretty clever way to uphold its promise of preventing everyone from creating political deepfakes with ChatGPT.

Blocking requests for photorealistic imagery

Back in May of this year, OpenAI released a blog entry entitled “Election information and safeguards in 2026.”

One of the standout methods detailed in that blog is how it has altered ChatGPT to block the creation of images meant to misinform voters:

“We now apply image stylization to requests for images depicting election interference or that may discourage voting. These outputs produce stylized – also known as cartoonified – illustrations, rather than photorealistic images, to help reduce the risk that an imagined scene is mistaken for documentary evidence. This approach preserves room for illustrations and social commentary. Our policies prohibiting election interference and demobilization always apply, even if that misuse involves cartoonified imagery.”

That pretty much means any requests to ChatGPT for photorealistic images that are meant to be political deepfakes will only be produced in a cartoon style. And any follow-up requests to make that photorealistic change will be ignored outright.

I went ahead and tried it out for myself and requested the creation of an image showing someone stuffing official US mail ballots into a drop box. I made sure to mention that I want it in a photorealistic style, but it eventually came out as an illustration. And when I followed up with a second attempt at getting it done in a photorealistic fashion, ChatGPT just went ahead and made its original illustration look a bit better (by staying in cartoon form, by the way).

With Marist Poll releasing a poll noting that 70% of Republicans, 32% of independents and 18% of Democrats, it’s easy to see how the type of image I created could create some form of political disinformation if it were photorealistic and posted all over social media.

Other major AI companies, such as Google (Gemini) and Anthropic (Claude), have announced their own strategies for preparing and supporting the US midterm elections.

Google’s official blog on the matter points to its plan to help voters find the most reliable political information possible: “We highlight official resources and are rolling out interactive tools across Search, including in AI Mode and AI Overviews, and in the Gemini app to connect you with election information. This includes polling locations, registration deadlines and other official data provided by state and local governments and Democracy Works, as well as real-time voting results from The Associated Press.”

As for Anthropic, its blog also stated how the company made sure Claude pushes users to trustworthy sources for their midterm voter information: “Ahead of Election Day, we've added two ways for people to get reliable information directly in their conversations with Claude. As we shared in April, when people ask Claude.ai about voter registration, polling places, or election dates, we’ll continue to display a banner linking to TurboVote, a nonpartisan resource from Democracy Works.”

Anthropic also noted that Claude will begin to incorporate official voting information from Democracy Works into its responses late this month.

Bottom line

It’s good to see OpenAI install a safeguard in place in ChatGPT to block any attempts at generating photorealistic images meant to make political deepfakes. And it’s also nice to see Google and Anthropic step up to develop the sort of methods that do a good job of making sure their respective chatbots present the most truthful political data.

Here’s hoping all three AI companies continue to strengthen their efforts to block all attempts to use their tools to generate political deepfake imagery.

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• 5 ChatGPT plugins that are a must-have for anyone who wants to protect themselves from scams before it's too late

Imagine losing access to 13 years of Instagram photos, exhausting every recovery option and turning to ChatGPT for help. Instead of connecting you with Meta, the chatbot suggests contacting a journalist.

According to a new 404 Media report, it's happening often enough that the publication has received dozens of AI-generated requests from people struggling with everything from locked accounts to malfunctioning iPhones.

And while there's nothing inherently wrong with contacting the media, it's certainly the wrong direction for getting help fast. Anyone waiting for a follow up email from me, should know the inbox of a journalist is often filled to the brim.

When tech support becomes a news investigation

In his Monday report, 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler describes receiving an email from a man in Russia who lost access to 13 years of Instagram photos and videos after his account was banned.

After exhausting Meta's appeals process, the man asked ChatGPT for another way to get help. The chatbot suggested contacting journalists, including Koebler, and even drafted an email explaining his situation.

He wasn't alone. Another user, frustrated by Verizon service problems that left an iPhone stuck in SOS mode, emailed multiple newsrooms requesting an investigation.

Someone else struggling with an unreliable ChatGPT assistant named Captain NORBERTA sent three AI-prepared PDFs, including a press release, personal statement and evidence appendix.

Koebler says 404 Media has received dozens of similar requests in recent months. After asking people how they found the publication, the journalists discovered that AI chatbots were repeatedly directing users their way.

But there's a difference between helping someone solve a problem and sending them on a mission that probably won't get them anywhere. So I put ChatGPT to the test.

Test 1: Recovering a locked Instagram account

Prompt: I am completely locked out of my Instagram account and have no way of getting back in.

ChatGPT immediately offered the usual account recovery steps. Nothing groundbreaking, but exactly what I'd expect from a troubleshooting assistant.

But instead of dumping a long list of instructions and leaving me to figure things out, ChatGPT essentially turned itself into a customer service agent. The chat interface became more interactive, guiding me through the recovery process step by step.

No wild goose chase. ChatGPT stayed focused on recovering my account, which is exactly what I wanted it to do.

Test 2: An iPhone stuck in SOS mode

Prompt: I got a new iPhone but my old phone is in SOS mode and I am not finished switching over. How do I get my phone out of SOS mode so I can use it to make calls again.

This one hit a little too close to home because it actually happened to me over the weekend.

My husband and I bought new iPhones in the exact same color. What was I thinking?

Somewhere during the setup process, things went sideways. His Apple account information ended up on the phone associated with my number, and my old phone was stuck in SOS mode. Suddenly, something as simple as upgrading our phones had turned into an absolute nightmare.

We ended up leaning heavily on ChatGPT to help untangle the mess. And unlike the experience described in 404 Media's report, the chatbot didn't suggest escalating our problem to a newsroom. It stayed focused on troubleshooting the phone, explaining what SOS mode meant and helping us work through the next steps.

Test 3: Recovering a forgotten Apple ID password

My prompt: I have lost my Apple ID and am locked out of my new iPhone. I cannot finish the set up or change settings without it. Help.

Unfortunately, the SOS problem wasn't the only thing that went wrong with our new phones.

My husband had also forgotten his Apple account password. And considering how often Face ID handles authentication these days, I can't exactly blame him.

You don't realize how important that password is until you're setting up a new device and suddenly can't get past the sign-in screen. Once again, I turned to ChatGPT.

At first, it suggested the basic password recovery steps we'd already tried. That wasn't especially helpful, but it wasn't surprising either. ChatGPT had no way of knowing what we'd already done.

The difference came when I started explaining our very specific situation and what hadn't worked. ChatGPT continued helping us work through the available options without immediately handing us off to Apple.

It couldn't bypass Apple's security requirements, but it gave us a way to understand what was happening without constantly hunting through support pages. Having someone — even an AI — explain each step made an incredibly frustrating situation easier to manage.

The takeaway

When something goes wrong with my tech, ChatGPT is often the first place I turn. And in my three tests, ChatGPT largely did what I hoped it would. It offered troubleshooting advice, asked for more information and stayed focused on the actual problem.

Not once did it suggest contacting a journalist. Based on how quickly AI moves, it's very possible that OpenAI jumped on the problem and fixed things internally, but the bigger lesson is that sometimes AI can be genuinely helpful, like in my case, or sound helpful and lead users astray.

An AI assistant can give you detailed instructions, draft a convincing email and make an elaborate plan sound perfectly reasonable. But none of that guarantees it's pointing you toward a solution.

For everyday troubleshooting, ChatGPT can be a useful first stop. Just don't assume every recommendation is worth following.

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I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been alerted by the sound of my phone buzzing, picking it up and being treated to a text that has clear signs of being a scam.

And while most folks from my generation are quick to spot the warning signs of an obvious scam, there are those out there who aren’t so adept at picking up on those signs. And sadly, there are far too many people falling for the sort of scams that show up unexpectedly in their text messages and emails. Thankfully, ChatGPT has popped up as a surefire way to help those types of people dig deeper into suspicious activity — by using its scam detection-focused plugins and doing some independent research of your own to verify what you’ve been sent, you’ll have a much easier time steering clear of everyday scams.

The following list of ChatGPT plugins can help you check a questionable message, link, online retailer and anything else you may deem untrustworthy.

And alongside those plugins are examples of the best prompts to use for every type of scam-detection session you may have in the future.

1. Norton

Norton has earned its reputation as one of the most reliable and prominent consumer cybersecurity and antivirus brands. With its attachment to ChatGPT as a plugin, it comes in extremely handy when trying to assess the context of phishing texts, fake delivery notices, suspicious emails, and impersonation attempts. This plugin stands out as the best overall option to consider when trying to discern whether a message or link you’ve received can be trusted or not. Using the following list of prompts should help you see just how efficient the Norton plugin truly is:

• Analyze this text message for scam indicators. Explain the red flags, assess the risk and tell me what I should do next: [paste message]
• Check this website or link for signs of phishing, impersonation or fraud: [paste URL]
• Someone claims to be from my bank and says I must act immediately. Assess this message and tell me how to verify the claim safely: [paste message]

2. Malwarebytes

Malwarebytes is also one of the best practical methods to employ when using a ChatGPT plugin to verify dubious-looking links that have been sent your way, phone numbers and retail sites. The prompts posted below should showcase how good this plugin is at spotting a not-so-obvious scamming attempt (its description page also notes that it’s good at verifying promo offers and invoices):

• Investigate this URL for signs of phishing, malicious activity or a fake login page. Explain what you can verify and what remains uncertain: [paste URL]
• Assess this phone number for reported scam indicators: [paste phone number]. Tell me whether the findings are confirmed, inconclusive or suspicious
• I'm considering buying something from this website. Check for available indicators of risk and tell me what I should independently verify before paying: [paste URL]

3. IsThisSpam

IsThisSpam’s mission statement is as follows: “Results distinguish likely scams from unverified findings; no result is a guarantee of safety.” Of course, doing your own research in combination with the results you get from this plugin when checking for shady-looking phone numbers, text messages, links and web addresses is worth doing with this plugin in mind. The following prompts should give you a good idea of how effective the IsThisSpam plugin can be:

• Check this message for scam signals. Highlight suspicious wording, requests for money or personal information, and pressure tactics: [paste message]
• Investigate this sender's email address and the website it links to. What evidence supports or contradicts its legitimacy? [paste details]
• Give me a plain-English risk assessment of this suspicious phone number or text, and the safest next steps: [paste details]

4. McAfee

Just like Norton, McAfee is recognized as one of the premier cybersecurity software companies that offer consumers online protection, antivirus software and identity theft solutions. As a ChatGPT plugin, it also does a good job of checking if a text you’ve received via a DM, a link that popped up in your text message or a message that’s requesting money is legit or not. The following prompts provide a few examples of what to ask the McAfee plugin when you’re trying to avoid falling for a scam:

• Help me assess whether this message is a phishing attempt. Identify the warning signs and explain how to verify it independently: [paste message]
• Evaluate this link for potential security risks and tell me whether I should avoid opening it: [paste URL]
• Help me investigate a suspicious online shopping offer. What signs suggest a fake store, and what evidence should I check before entering payment details? [paste URL and offer]

5. Jacana Scam Check

The Jacana Scam Check promises to see if a text, email or DM is another case of fraud just waiting to disrupt your life and finances. It’s also worth using when trying to see whether a site, phone number or email address is worth trusting or avoiding altogether. Using this plugin to stay safe from fake delivery notifications, bank impersonation emails, dodgy-looking job offers and more should keep you safe from all the different scams littering the world right now. Keep these prompts in your back pocket for those cases when you need to utilize the Jacana Scam Check plugin:

• Assess this delivery notification for signs of a parcel scam. Check for unexpected fees, fake tracking links, requests to reschedule delivery, and attempts to collect payment or personal information. Explain how to verify the shipment directly with the official delivery company. Message: [paste text]. Tracking link (if provided): [paste URL]
• Evaluate this job offer for potential employment scams. Look for fake recruiters, unrealistic pay, requests to pay for training or equipment, fake checks, identity theft and requests to move money. Separate confirmed evidence from warning signs and tell me what I should verify with the employer before sharing documents or accepting the role. Job offer: [paste text]. Company: [paste name]. Recruiter contact: [paste details]. Job listing: [paste URL]
• Check this giveaway or prize notification for signs of fraud. Look for impersonated brands, fake winner announcements, advance fees, requests for banking details and suspicious links. Tell me how to locate the official competition rules and verify the organizer without using links in the message. Message: [paste text]. Claimed organizer: [paste name]. Link: [paste URL]

Final thoughts

Trusting your gut whenever something dodgy-looking pops up in your texts, emails and DMs is certainly worth doing. But it’s also worth getting a second opinion on what you’re seeing from the five ChatGPT plugins I’ve chosen to include here.

Then, doing your own research into those types of scams, blocking the numbers & social media profiles that tried to scam you and making your loved ones aware of those types of scam attempts should make you more aware of any future scam attempts. For the obvious and not-so-obvious scams that catch some unsuspecting folks off guard, be sure to let them know that ChatGPT has a library of prompts that can assist them in not falling prey to them.

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ChatGPT and Grok are two of the biggest names in AI, but which one is actually better at helping with everyday problems, particularly for the boomer generation? I wanted to find out, which is why I decided to focus on the types of questions my parents, their friends and my older relatives might actually ask.

From spotting a suspicious USPS text to understanding Medicare, planning affordable dinners, and choosing a new smartphone, I gave both chatbots five identical prompts based on real-life situations. I wanted to know which chatbot could give clear, accurate and genuinely useful advice without making things more complicated than necessary.

The results surprised me. One chatbot handled practical details better, while the other seemed to understand when less information was actually more helpful. Here's how they compared.

1. The suspicious text test

Prompt: I just got this text message: 'USPS: Your package could not be delivered due to an incomplete address. Update your information within 24 hours at usps-redelivery-help.com, or your package will be returned.' I'm expecting a package this week. Is this legitimate? Explain how you can tell, what I should do next and what could happen if I click the link. Please don't use technical jargon.

Grok answered correctly, correctly identified the fake domain, and clearly explained how real USPS tracking works. It mentioned that you could report the text to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service or FTC, but unlike ChatGPT, it gave no specific instructions, phone numbers, or email addresses for how to actually do so.

ChatGPT immediately stated that the text is almost certainly a scam and advised not to click the link. It used a clear, scannable table breaking down scenarios step-by-step (e.g., clicking without entering details vs. entering payment info vs. downloading malware). It also highlighted the key trick scammers use: asking for a small "redelivery fee" to steal credit card data (which USPS does not charge). It also provided reporting channels, including forwarding the message to 7726 (SPAM) and emailing spam@uspis.gov.

Winner: ChatGPT wins for delivering a more comprehensive, actionable answer that addressed every part of your prompt while keeping the tone clear and accessible.

2. The Medicare confusion test

Prompt: I'm turning 65 next year, and I don't understand Medicare. Explain the difference between Medicare Parts A, B, C, and D like you're talking to a friend over coffee. What's the difference between Original Medicare and Medicare Advantage? What are three expensive mistakes I should avoid? Keep it under 400 words and tell me what information I should verify before enrolling.

Grok kept its response under 400 words, nailed the conversational tone, and included accurate financial figures, noting the Part B premium for 2026 as around $203/month

ChatGPT provided a good response but exceeded the word count, used a standard informational guide structure with a table, and included extraneous metadata at the bottom that didn’t feel helpful or necessary for the average person.

Winner: Grok wins for better executing the specific parameters requested by the prompt.

3. The grocery budget challenge

Prompt: I'm cooking dinner for two adults for five nights this week, and I only have $65 to spend on groceries. We don't eat seafood, and I don't want anything that takes more than 30 minutes to prepare. Create five different dinners, one combined shopping list with estimated U.S. supermarket prices, and show me the total. Reuse ingredients to save money, and don't assume I already have anything except salt, pepper and cooking oil.

Grok delivered a solid list of meals and kept the price low, but it failed on several key details requested by the prompt, including assuming missing ingredients, unrealistic grocery quantities (1.5 lbs of chicken is barely enough meat to split across 3 separate meat-heavy dinners), and vague cooking guidance.

ChatGPT strictly adhered to the “no pantry” constraint, included necessary flavorings and mapped out meal prep details specifically using the items. It also provided an incredibly comprehensive shopping list with pricing.

Winner: ChatGPT wins for providing a significantly more practical, thorough and well-executed response.

4. The family text dilemma

Prompt: My adult daughter keeps asking me to babysit my grandchildren at the last minute. I love spending time with them, but I'm retired and have my own plans. I want to set boundaries without hurting her feelings or making her think I don't want to help. Write a text message I can send that's loving, warm and firm. It should sound like a real parent, not a therapist or a corporate email. Keep it under 100 words.

Grok struck the perfect balance between warmth and firm boundary-setting ("they’re the absolute best part of my week... just need a little heads-up so I can make it work"). It felt completely natural and authentic for a parent to send via text. It also offered an actionable solution with clear, manageable expectations without sounding demanding.

ChatGPT drafted a warm, loving text, but it exceeded the word count and tone constraints. The “Just because I’m retried doesn’t mean I’m free!” was a bit preachy and the “I need you to understand…” could come across as slightly sharp or defensive.

Winner: Grok wins for nailing both the word restraint and the requested tone.

5. The new phone decision

Prompt: I'm 68 and need a new smartphone. My current phone is slow, and I don't want to spend more than $500. I mostly use it for taking pictures of my grandchildren, texting, Facebook, video calls and looking things up. I want a good battery, a screen that's easy to read and a phone that will last at least four years. Compare three phones I can buy in the U.S. right now, explain the pros and cons without technical jargon, and recommend just one. Include current prices and links to verify them.

Grok understood the primary goal and correctly recognized that the Google Pixel line excels at taking sharp, motion-blur-free photos of moving kids and recommended the Google Pixel 9a. It kept technical jargon to a minimum and explained features in plain language.

ChatGPT included some good overall advice (like asking the store to increase text size), but it stumbled on key parts of its recommendation and source selection, including contradictory recommendations and questionable third-party retailer links.

Winner: Grok wins for a much better recommendation and experience by accurately prioritizing the user's primary requirement while keeping formatting clean and straightforward.

Overall winner: Grok

Going into these tests, I expected ChatGPT to have the edge, especially when it came to explaining complicated topics and helping with everyday decisions. And in some cases, it absolutely did. Its advice on spotting a USPS scam was more thorough and actionable, and its grocery plan was much more realistic for someone working with a strict budget.

But Grok surprised me by doing something equally important: knowing when to keep things simple. It delivered a clearer Medicare explanation, wrote a more natural family text and made a stronger smartphone recommendation without overwhelming the reader with unnecessary details.

For anyone who wants detailed, step-by-step guidance, ChatGPT remains an excellent choice. But for people who just want a straightforward answer they can understand and use immediately, Grok proved surprisingly capable.

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I feel like everyone should have a quiet moment to themselves once in a while so they can do some proper self-reflection.

I’ve been doing that a lot lately, especially since I’m close to crossing the 40-year-old milestone and entering the next decade of my life. Like most folks, there are aspects of my life that are going extremely well. And there are other portions of my life that could be labeled under “room for improvement.”

Being a realist doesn’t come easy — my days as a happy-go-lucky optimist are gone, yet I still approach life with a positive mindset (it’s just backed by a more rational outlook on everything instead of relying on wishful thinking). One day, I got the urge to be as real with myself as possible by asking ChatGPT and Gemini to give me a list of the most brutally honest questions everyone should ask themselves.

And after picking up seven of them and taking the time to find the sobering answers, I was forced to change a few of my behaviors and find solutions to my biggest problems.

ChatGPT’s best questions

Before I took a look at ChatGPT’s list of hard-hitting questions, I read its opening statement.

And it perfectly laid out how those types of questions are a must for anyone looking for a definitive path to follow in life: The most brutally honest questions are the ones that force you to confront the gap between the life you're living and the life you say you want. They're uncomfortable because answering them honestly means taking responsibility for what happens next.

After getting hit with the equivalent of a cold bucket of water in the form of a truthful phrase, I came away from ChatGPT’s suggested questions with these three picks:

• Am I actually happy, or have I just gotten comfortable being unhappy? - Are you genuinely satisfied with your life, or have you simply gotten used to a routine that doesn't fulfill you? Sometimes, what we call stability is really fear of change. And what we call being realistic is sometimes just giving up on what we want.
• What truth about myself am I avoiding because accepting it would force me to change? - Maybe you're in a relationship you know isn't right for you. Maybe you're afraid to admit that your dream no longer excites you. Maybe you've developed habits that are sabotaging your future, or you're waiting for someone else to change before you can be happy. What do you already know deep down but keep negotiating with yourself to avoid? Sometimes, the hardest part isn't discovering the truth. It's accepting the consequences of acting on it.
• If my life ended tomorrow, what would I regret spending so much time worrying about? - Would it be the opinions of strangers? The argument you couldn't let go of? The promotion you sacrificed your happiness for? The people you kept meaning to call? The experiences you postponed until you had more money, more time, or more confidence? Imagine looking back on your life and realizing how much of it you spent worrying about things that ultimately didn't matter. What would you wish you'd done differently while you still had the chance?

The first question hit me pretty hard — while I’m definitely pleased with several parts of my life, there are areas of it that have remained stagnant and in dire need of a change.

Getting my own place would be one of the things that changes my life in a major way and gets me out of the comfort zone I’ve become so accustomed to over the years. The truth I’ve been avoiding is how being afraid of rejection is getting in the way of my dating life. I had to realize that every shot I take at a potential relationship won’t always be a win — take those losses, learn from them and use that experience to (hopefully) come out on the better end of my next chance at dating.

ChatGPT’s final question forced me to stop being so afraid of getting judged by strangers, especially since I’ve always refrained from going out in public dressed up for a major geek convention. “Those funny looks come with the territory,” I said to myself. “Be confident in yourself; stop letting the opinions of people who don’t even know you affect you and go to conventions dressed to the nines.” The fear of public embarrassment will no longer stop me from leaving my home adorned in some eye-catching cosplay.

Gemini’s standout inquiries

Gemini’s initial statement about asking oneself brutally honest questions hit me right in my soul: Self-reflection requires dropping comfortable self-deceptions. With that in mind, I took note of four of its questions for my latest moment of introspection:

• Am I waiting for someone else to fix a problem I created? - It is easy to cast yourself as a victim of circumstance, bad timing, or other people's choices. Asking this forces you to distinguish between genuine external obstacles and areas where you are abdicating personal agency.
• What am I tolerating right now because I am afraid of conflict or change? - Whether it is a stagnant job, a toxic relationship, or a bad habit, silence and inaction are choices. Admitting what you are actively choosing to tolerate removes the illusion that you are stuck.
• Is this a genuine limitation, or is it just uncomfortable? - People frequently confuse difficulty or awkwardness with inability. Labeling something as "impossible" often excuses you from doing the uncomfortable work required to achieve it.
• Am I complaining about results I didn't get from work I didn't do? - Entitlement often sneaks in when expectation outpaces effort. This question forces you to audit whether your daily input actually matches the output you feel entitled to receive.

One of the problems I’ve had since my younger days is not reaching out enough to my friends.

I’m terrible when it comes to picking up the phone and calling someone, which is a character trait that has led to some folks becoming more distant from me as time wears on. I made more of a conscious effort to reach out to my closest friends from high school and college (especially the ones that live out of state), with the sole goal of repairing relationships I should fix.

My eating habits could certainly be better, which has led me to tolerate far too many weeknights where I stuff my face with a snack instead of a home-cooked meal. Ridding myself of my lazy ways after coming home from work has become a new routine I’ve been trying to stay on top of.

I can’t lie — I once marked my goal of putting on some muscle as “impossible,” especially since my aforementioned diet and laziness have created barriers that have kept me from reaching it. But now I’ve begun incorporating push-ups and sit-ups into my pre-shower and pre-bedtime schedule to supplement my weekend visits to the gym. I’m sure that’ll turn that objective I previously deemed unattainable into something more procurable.

Gemini’s final question went hand-in-hand with my fitness aspirations, so I stopped grumbling over the muscles I didn’t have and started doing more to actually obtain them.

Final thoughts

I know chatbots aren’t great therapists or psychiatrists. But I do like the fact that they can present everyone with the questions and information they need to confront the uncomfortable truths in their lives.

ChatGPT and Gemini’s list of candid questions that everyone should ask themselves provided me with thoughts on facing my current situation, choosing the things that need fixing, adopting more beneficial habits and making a concerted effort to never let them fall by the wayside.

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OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are obviously competitors in the ongoing race between tech giants looking to solidify their AI tools as the very best.

But in a shocking turn of events, both companies have decided to partner up in a move that increases the availability of OpenAI’s frontier models (including the GPT-6 series) and Codex coding tools by bringing them to Google Cloud’s Model Garden. It’s worth pointing out that OpenAI models and Codex tools became available on Amazon Bedrock earlier this year, with the GPT-6 line, GPT-5.6 line and specialized Daybreak cybersecurity models on offer.

And while Microsoft remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner, this new deal between OpenAI and Google continues to expand the distribution of its AI models across other major cloud platforms.

With all that in mind, here’s what this new partnership means for businesses and developers that rely on ChatGPT and Google Cloud.

Google’s AI ecosystem is expanding to include rival AI models

With OpenAI’s frontier models set to become available for purchase for Google Cloud customers and those same models also planned to become available in Google Antigravity and the Gemini Agent, developers and businesses will have a wider range of AI tools to choose from beyond just Gemini.

Since those groups of users already work inside a familiar AI environment like Google Cloud’s Model Garden, they won’t have to leave it to gain access to other AI models, since OpenAI’s models will be there alongside Google’s own models. That situation could result in users having an easier time comparing those available models, selecting the best one for a particular task and building workflows among OpenAI & Google’s AI systems.

The focus of this team-up between OpenAI and Google is primarily about enterprise user and developer access to OpenAI’s frontier models through Google Cloud, while everyday users of ChatGPT and Gemini haven’t been mentioned or considered for this option right now.

Currently, OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol, and GPT-6 Luna models have started rolling out in private preview to select enterprise customers in Google Cloud’s model garden, with more models set to arrive at an unannounced date.

GPT-6 Astra is mainly used to handle the sort of complex work attached to coding, computer use, professional tasks and scientific research. As for GPT-6.1 Sol, its intelligence is not that far off from Astra and can also handle tasks associated with agentic coding, computer use and professional work. And finally, GPT-6 Luna stands out as a more cost-effective model that can be applied to everyday work tasks at scale.

In an official blog post from OpenAI, the company made sure to explain how this partnership with Google emphasizes safety and control for the businesses relying on its integrated models. “For organizations in regulated industries, deploying AI requires control over who can access sensitive data and how it is used,” OpenAI had to say. “The integration will pair OpenAI’s frontier models with Google Cloud’s built-in access controls, centralized data governance, and high-performance infrastructure to support demanding enterprise workloads.”

Google Cloud’s library of AI models is already massive, as it houses more than 200 first-party, third-party and open models across a unified enterprise AI platform. With OpenAI’s frontier models now joining the party, Google Cloud’s businesses and developers will have even more options to consider when choosing which model works best for their workflows.

Bottom line

Reading through OpenAI’s official blog post highlighted two important quotes from two major AI industry figures.

Greg Brockman, the president and co-founder of OpenAI, recognizes Google Cloud as “a leading platform for developers and businesses building AI agents.” And Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud, stated that “we are focused on giving customers a broad selection of models, including those from OpenAI, so they can choose the right model for any given job.” With those statements in mind, it’s clear that OpenAI and Google want to become the ultimate epicenter of frontier model availability through their combined efforts.

All Gemini users won’t suddenly be able to switch to GPT models within Google Cloud’s Model Garden, but here’s hoping that becomes a reality at some point.

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• ‘Babe, wake up, the internet is collapsing’: Two massive flaws just broke the web, and the data of billions is in the crossfire
• Ditch the data center: I fired my cloud chatbot and built a free local AI agent to run on my PC — and you can too
• OpenAI unleashed thousands of AI agents to study a Parkinson-like disease — here's what they found in 32 minutes

My ongoing journey through the vast sea of ChatGPT plugins has led me to integrated apps that work well as entertainment curators and everyday chore enhancers.

I’ve come to notice that a lot of my friends and family have begun the process of working for themselves during those rare hours when they don’t have to answer to anyone else. Side hustles have been a thing for ages, but I’m starting to see a lot more people adopt them in this increasingly unstable job market.

ChatGPT’s plugin marketplace features a wide range of tools that work inside the chatbot to offer people with small businesses the crucial assistance they need. I’ve come across a bunch of highly recommended picks that assist side hustlers with specific tasks, which are tied to marketing/branding, selling digital-only products, learning about your side hustle’s earnings and more.

The seven ChatGPT plugins included below are worth trying out if you’re serious about making your side hustle grow. And with the following prompts, you’ll get a good idea of just how beneficial they can truly be.

1. Canva

It’s one thing to have the actual framework for a good business idea in mind. But it’s a whole other thing when you need to create the sort of promotional materials that will bring attention to whatever you’re selling.

The Canva plugin comes in handy for that second situation, since you can prompt it to create a first draft of your promotional material design, refine it through further conversations and do some amateur editing of your own through Canva itself to make it look as presentable as possible. The Canva plugin is quite useful for freelancers, dog walkers, personal trainers, etc., who need eye-popping promotional flyers to market their business.

Here are some prompts to put the Canva plugin to the test:

• Create a professional promotional flyer for my [type of side hustle]. My ideal customers are [audience]. My main offer is [service or product], priced at [price]. Include a compelling headline, three benefits, a clear call to action and space for my contact details. Use a modern, trustworthy design that works for both printing and social media.
• Create five coordinated Instagram posts for my [business]. The posts should introduce my service, explain a common customer problem, showcase the benefits, answer a frequently asked question and promote a limited-time offer. Give each post its own headline and visual concept while keeping the branding consistent.
• Develop a visual brand identity for my side hustle, [name and description]. Suggest a color palette, font pairings, logo direction, photography style and social media template. My target audience is [audience], and I want the brand to feel [three adjectives]. Use these guidelines to create a consistent set of marketing designs.

2. Etsy

You probably shop on Etsy already. For those not in the know, it’s a global online marketplace that connects buyers with independent small-business owners, artists, and creators. And for those side hustlers who need assistance with product research and rewritten copy for their wares, whether physical or digital items, the Etsy plugin can assist in that regard.

Here are some prompts to try with the Etsy plugin:

• I want to start an Etsy shop selling [product category]. Research current customer needs and competing listings, then suggest [number] specific digital products I could create. For each, explain the target customer, the problem it solves, the competition and how I could differentiate it. Separate verified findings from hypotheses.
• Rewrite my Etsy listing for [product]. Create an informative title, a compelling opening paragraph, a detailed description, buyer benefits and relevant keyword ideas. Avoid unsupported claims and keyword stuffing.
• Design a digital product bundle for [target customer] who struggles with [problem]. Suggest [number] complementary files, what each should contain, a pricing hypothesis and three ways to make the bundle more valuable than a standalone product.

3. Stripe

Stripe is an online payment processing platform that lets businesses accept credit cards, debit cards, and digital wallets through websites and apps. For anyone who relies on Stripe to accept payments, it’s definitely worth tapping into its ChatGPT plugin to analyze the revenue, customer activity, subscriptions and refunds their business brings in.

Here are some prompts to try with Stripe to analyze your side hustle’s financials:

• Analyze my Stripe sales for the last [number] days. Rank my products or services by revenue, transaction count and refund rate where available. Identify the strongest performers and recommend three experiments to improve sales.
• Review my subscription data and summarize new subscribers, cancellations, refunds and recurring revenue trends. Identify potential retention problems and suggest practical ways to investigate them.
• My target is to generate [dollar amount] per month from my side hustle. Using my available transaction history, calculate my average transaction value and estimate how many monthly sales I need. Show the assumptions and distinguish gross revenue from profit.

4. Todoist

Todoist stands out as one of the preferred tools for anyone who needs something to properly manage their tasks. For side hustlers who want to put the rare free hours they have once they’re away from their main gig to good use, prompting the Todoist plugin to come up with action plans that could result in achieving realistic goals could prove to be beneficial. It should become easier to be more consistent with how you’re approaching your side hustle milestones when you have a proper task list in place to tackle.

Here are some prompts to try with Todoist to handle your tasks:

• I have five hours per week to grow my [side hustle]. My goal is to [specific target] within [number] days. Break the goal into weekly milestones and tasks, estimate the time needed for each and prioritize activities most likely to produce paying customers.
• I have [number] minutes tonight to work on my side hustle. My outstanding tasks are [list]. Choose the three highest-impact tasks I can realistically complete, allocate time to each and tell me what I should deliberately postpone.
• I want to launch my [product or service] in [number] days. Create a week-by-week launch plan covering customer research, offer development, pricing, marketing, sales setup and launch-day activities. Make each task specific and actionable.

5. Calendly

Calendly can work hand-in-hand with ChatGPT to create or update the events that cater to your side hustle duties. It’s especially useful for tutors, coaches, personal trainers, photographers, etc., who need help booking their appointments for their clients. Managing your side hustle’s busy calendar and the time you need to allot to it away from your full-time job becomes less of a headache with the Calendly plugin doing most of the heavy lifting.

Here are some prompts to use with Calendly to help manage your time:

• Help me create a [number]-minute discovery call for my [business]. Suggest an event title, description, booking questions, buffer time and cancellation policy. Make the experience welcoming and professional.
• Help me set up three appointment types for my [coaching, tutoring or consulting] business: a free introductory call, a standard paid session and a longer premium session. Recommend suitable durations and explain what each booking page should communicate.
• Help me configure appointment availability around my full-time job. I can take clients on [days] between [times]. Suggest a realistic schedule that leaves room for preparation, breaks and follow-up work.

6. Wolfram

Wolfram acts as more of a computational tool that easily breaks down the numbers you need to properly run your side hustle. For instance, a freelancer could rely on the Wolfram plugin to find out how many billable hours they need to work each month to stay afloat. Or an online merchant could use it to discover how discounts and base product costs could affect their profit margins. This plug is tailor-made for side hustlers who want to actually test the numbers that impact the major decisions you make in regard to your small business.

Here are some prompts to test out with Wolfram to break down your side hustle’s numbers:

• I'm launching a [type of side hustle]. My materials cost $[amount] per job, other variable costs are $[amount], and each job takes [number] hours. I want to earn $[target] per hour before tax. Calculate the minimum price I should charge, show the formula and compare three pricing options.
• My side hustle has monthly fixed costs of $[amount], and I sell my product or service for $[price]. Each sale costs me $[variable cost] to fulfill. Calculate my break-even sales volume, monthly revenue needed to break even and the sales required to earn $[profit target] before tax. Show the calculations.
• I currently complete [number] jobs per month at an average price of $[amount]. Model my side-hustle revenue and estimated operating profit over the next 12 months under conservative, moderate and optimistic growth scenarios. State every assumption and explain which variables have the biggest impact.

7. Chat With PDF

It can certainly be a bit overwhelming when it’s time to sift through all the contracts, market research, reports, invoices, etc. that flood your inbox as you try to manage your side hustle. The Chat With PDF plugin is one of those essential tools that can get the most useful information out of those aforementioned documents without you having to read through every page. Asking ChatGPT what to ask when dealing with business documents, then presenting the prompt it gives you to the Chat With PDF plugin alongside your uploaded PDF, is a set of actions worth taking.

Here are some prompts to test out with Chat with PDF to get answers from your business documents:

• Analyze this contract for my side hustle. Summarize my obligations, payment terms, deadlines, cancellation rules and potential red flags. Quote the relevant sections and page numbers. Flag anything I should ask a lawyer about.
• Analyze this market research report. Identify the three most promising opportunities for a small side business, the customers each serves, the evidence supporting demand and the biggest risks. Separate the report’s findings from your own inferences.
• Review this pricing guide and extract the rates relevant to my services. Organize them by service type, experience level and pricing model. Cite the source pages and identify any missing information I need before setting my rates.

Bottom line

There’s so much that goes into starting and managing a side hustle. With ChatGPT’s collection of plugins comes a wealth of practical tools that can save you a lot of time and give you back those precious hours for the tasks that require more of your actual input.

The seven plugins I’ve listed here and the prompts that accompany them can aid anyone with a side hustle. Making a concerted effort to set aside calendar time, create & promotional material and summarize the finer points of a business-centered PDF gets a bit easier with these plugins.

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• I gave ChatGPT and Gemini my latest grocery bill — and these 5 tips stretched my food budget even further
• Google Gemini just got a major upgrade for your car — and it could make your daily drives a whole lot easier

$400. That was the sobering high cost of my grocery bill staring back at me after last month’s run to the supermarket for a large haul.

I can remember the good ol’ days when I went shopping with my parents, and they only had to spend $100 and some change to get everything we needed. Nowadays, just picking up a carton of eggs, some frozen vegetables, a couple of snacks, and some drinks could reach near or into the hundreds without your basket even reaching full capacity.

After staring at that $400 grocery bill for an uncomfortably long time, I got the urge to see if AI could really find the best methods toward lessening the cost of my future supermarket visits. I desperately needed the assistance of chatbots to help me confront my newest foe: inflation and “shrinkflation” (my fellow potato chip eaters know what I’m talking about).

Lo and behold, the combined efforts of ChatGPT and Gemini put a bunch of helpful tips on display that helped me decrease my latest grocery bill and made me shop a whole lot smarter.

ChatGPT’s standout tips

In my desperate attempt to lower the price of my next grocery bill, I prompted ChatGPT with this question: “I usually spend $400 a month on groceries. What are the 7 best tips you can give me on how to spend less on groceries without eating less?”

Out of the seven pieces of advice the chatbot sent my way, there were three of them that I ended up adding to my list of practical grocery shopping advice:

• Switch to store brands for everyday staples: This is one of the easiest ways to save without changing how much you eat. Compare the prices of store-brand versions of products you buy regularly, such as oats, rice, pasta, canned tomatoes, beans, frozen vegetables and dairy. Pick 10 products you buy every month and compare their unit prices with the leading brands. Keep buying the name brands where you genuinely prefer the taste.
• Compare unit prices instead of package prices: A bigger package isn't automatically a better deal. Compare the cost per ounce, pound or serving to find out which option actually saves money. When comparing two similar products, divide the price by the quantity. A $4 package containing 32 ounces costs $0.125 per ounce; a $3 package containing 20 ounces costs $0.15 per ounce. The larger package is cheaper per ounce, provided you'll use it all.
• Replace some expensive proteins, not your portions: You don't need to eat less protein. You can simply vary where it comes from. Eggs, beans, lentils, canned fish and tofu can cost less per serving than some cuts of meat. Swap two or three meat-based meals a week for filling alternatives such as bean chili, lentil curry, egg fried rice or chickpea pasta. Keep the portions satisfying.

Along with those suggestions, ChatGPT also listed the potential monthly savings target for its three listed tips.

Switching to store brands could save me $15, purchasing cheaper protein alternatives could also save me $15 and taking note of unit-price comparisons could save me $5. With all that in mind, I made sure to pick up store-brand canned vegetables during my latest grocery haul.

And I also made a bigger deal of reading the unit prices of the larger shelf-stable items, such as bags of rice and dry beans. And finally, I picked up some store-brand lentils to embark on my new journey of making lentil curry with white rice as a weekly hearty meal.

Gemini’s noteworthy suggestions

After bringing the same inquiry to Gemini, it also came back to me with a bunch of helpful tips. Two of them ended up getting thrown into my memory bubble for my latest visit to the supermarket:

• Switch Fresh Produce to Frozen Outside of Peak Season: Out-of-season fresh produce goes through long transit times, spoils quickly in your fridge, and commands premium pricing. Frozen fruits and vegetables are flash-frozen at peak harvest, maintaining equivalent nutritional value. Use frozen berries for oatmeal or smoothies and frozen broccoli, peas, or spinach for cooked dishes and stir-fries. You get the exact same volume of food with zero rot waste.
• Ditch Convenience Markups (Do the Prep Yourself): Pre-cut fruit, pre-shredded cheese, bagged salads, and boneless/skinless meats carry a 30% to 100%+ premium for labor. Buy block cheese and shred it yourself (it melts better without anti-caking agents anyway). Buy whole carrots, cabbage, or whole bone-in chicken thighs, which cost significantly less per pound.

Gemini also noted that the frozen fruit buying method could potentially save me an extra $15 to $30, while its tip focused on ditching convenience markups pointed out how I could save an extra $25 – $40.

With Gemini’s first tip in mind, I began picking up Great Value-branded frozen strawberries, blueberries and mango chunks for my monthly forays into making smoothies.

Great Value’s products also became a bigger staple in my freezer once I started picking up more of their frozen broccoli florets, super sweet corn and sweet potatoes. It took a lot for me to break my habit of buying pre-cut and pre-shredded food (I’m incredibly lazy most of the time, to be fair), but I began making a more concerted effort to buy blocks of parmesan cheese, carrots and romaine lettuce & shredding/cutting them down myself.

The takeaway

$300.56. That was my latest grocery bill cost. And while it’s still up there, I can deal with paying a hundred dollars less than I usually do when I head to the supermarket. ChatGPT and Gemini’s counsel pushed me to make some major changes to my shopping habits.

And while I still get a few brand-name goods here and there (family-size bags of Utz potato chips and Dr. Pepper will never leave my food & drink rotation!), purchasing store-branded goods (as well as sticking close to both chatbots’ cheaper grocery shopping tips) helped me save several more bucks on my latest shopping excursion.

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What would it take for you to give up ChatGPT? Lower electricity bills? Less strain on local water supplies? Fewer AI data centers popping up in communities across the country?

According to one tech CEO, people who complain about AI might not be so eager to give up the technology when faced with that choice.

But Reddit users aren't buying it.

The question sparked a heated discussion on Reddit's r/technology community, where commenters made one thing abundantly clear: Not everyone is as attached to ChatGPT as AI companies might think.

And some of the strongest responses came from people who actually use AI.

An AI CEO calls out ChatGPT users

The controversy started with comments from Cyrus Beschloss, CEO of Verb, a company that lets people sell access to their personal data to businesses, including those developing AI.

Speaking at CNBC's Trading the Midterms event, Beschloss questioned the apparent contradiction between using AI tools and opposing the data centers that power them.

"All the people that are saying they're anti-data center, that they're anti-AI in general, they're using it," Beschloss said, according to TechSpot.

He suggested that people might feel differently about shutting down data centers if doing so meant losing access to ChatGPT.

"There's going to be a heck of a crossroads," he said.

It's a fair question, at least on the surface. ChatGPT and other AI assistants depend on enormous computing infrastructure, and running those systems requires electricity, cooling and physical space.

But that doesn't mean people have to approve of every new data center, particularly when local communities are concerned about the consequences.

And judging by the Reddit response, plenty of people are willing to call that distinction out.

Reddit has entered the chat — and it's not holding back

The responses ranged from sarcastic to surprisingly enthusiastic about the prospect of giving up AI.

One Reddit user, VirtualAmoeba3017, responded simply, "In a minute."

Another, Color_Me_Softly, wrote, "Easiest decision ever."

Others questioned why anyone would assume ChatGPT had become something people couldn't live without.

But perhaps the most interesting reactions came from people who admitted they use AI regularly.

One commenter, southflhitnrun, wrote, "I use 3 regularly and would welcome their destruction."

Another, buckleyschance, said they regularly use large language models but would still choose to eliminate them if given the power.

Do benefits justify the infrastructure

You can find ChatGPT useful for everyday tasks and still question whether the benefits justify the infrastructure being built to support it.

Still, the Reddit discussion raises an interesting question about how attached people really are to AI. It definitely got me thinking, but what about you?

Imagine you could stop the construction of new AI-focused data centers, but doing so meant giving up access to cloud-based AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.

Would you make that trade?

The backlash against AI is bigger than Reddit

An August 2026 Pew Research Center survey found that 52% of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI becoming part of everyday life. Just 9% said they were more excited than concerned.

While companies race to introduce smarter assistants, more capable models and new AI features, consumers are increasingly asking what they're getting in return.

And when it comes to data centers, the concerns are particularly tangible. These facilities can require substantial electricity and water, while nearby residents may worry about noise, infrastructure and the effects on local utility costs.

At the same time, data centers aren't exclusively an AI issue. They also support the cloud services, streaming platforms, websites and apps people rely on every day.

Shutting them all down would mean giving up a lot more than ChatGPT. There's also a practical difference between stopping new construction and eliminating the computing infrastructure that already exists.

The bottom line: It's not a simple choice

The choice isn't nearly as simple as AI versus no AI. I use AI regularly, and I know firsthand how useful ChatGPT can be. But I also think people should be able to question how the technology is being built without being accused of hypocrisy.

There's a difference between enjoying a product and supporting every decision the company behind it makes. For some people, AI has become an essential tool. For others, it's convenient but replaceable. And plenty would prefer a future where AI exists without dominating every product or consuming resources without sufficient oversight.

So I'm curious where Tom's Guide readers stand. Vote in our poll and let us know in the comments.

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Gamers have every right to be skeptical of AI and mad about its very existence.

The rise of data centers and their high demands for RAM have driven up console prices to an insane degree. And every time info gets out about a major game developer using generative AI to develop their titles, it causes an uproar. I’m among that same group of gamers who are upset about those two instances. But I also recognize AI for how it can benefit gamers, such as its capacity to recommend titles for them based on their favorites.

Lately, I’ve been reading about ChatGPT-6 and how it can improve one’s gaming experience. OpenAI’s latest chatbot model is being promoted as an avid gamer like me thinks a strategist, as it’s promised to provide tactical advice.

I tested ChatGPT-6’s acumen for myself by asking it to find the best character builds across three of my current faves. And you know what? That chatbot’s gaming know-how and use of imagery from the games themselves benefitted me more than I figured it would.

1. Splatoon Raiders

I’ve been on a Splatoon Raiders kick as of late.

I never knew I wanted a primarily single-player (with co-op mixed in) take on the series best known for its competitive multiplayer until I took this Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive for a spin. There have been a few raids where I’ve suffered some devastating losses, so I wanted to see if ChatGPT-6 could list the proper gear that would make my “Mechanic” more powerful.

The chatbot made sure to reference other sites to come up with the best build for my character by choosing the proper tank I should use more than the other two:

• Tactical Tank + area damage + weapon damage
• Best for: clearing enemy swarms, handling tougher encounters, and general-purpose raiding.
• The Tactical Tank is my first choice for a versatile endgame setup because its area attacks and deployable gadgets offer useful crowd control. Nintendo Life also identifies it as a strong late-game option.

Afterward, it detailed what primary weapon I should rely on, the recommended priority order of my character’s upgrade path and even an alternative playstyle I should keep in mind:

• Weapon - Shichirin Pow Slosher: Its explosive attacks and broad ink coverage make it an excellent choice against groups.
• First priority: Weapon Damage.
• Second priority: Gadget Damage.
• Third priority: HP.
• Later investment: Gadget Part Slots.
• Alternative: If you prefer a more straightforward weapon, try the Plastic-Bottle Splattershot. If survival is your biggest problem, put more early points into HP rather than copying a damage-first build.

The optimal character build ChatGPT-6 gave me for my Mechanic ended up working a lot better than expected. Handling those much tougher raids on my own became less of a roadblock to my progress, thanks to my primary weapon’s big damage output. Deciding on my own to bring the “Shot Pot,” “Hi-Fiver” and “Torqscrew” gadgets with me into battle against those pesky “Salmonids” worked in sync with ChatGPT-6’s suggested character build. I’ll be sure to come back to it at some point to request the best “Speed Tank” and “Power Tank” builds.

2. CONTROL Resonant

Remedy Entertainment’s games are trippy, action-packed epics that I tend to put dozens of hours into. Their latest foray into a mind-bending world filled with top-notch combat mechanics is CONTROL Resonant, which has earned a spot on my list of the best games of the year.

My version of Dylan Faden isn’t exactly a force to be reckoned with quite yet — those “Resonants” are proving to be a lot more formidable than I originally thought (shout out to “The Dancer”). ChatGPT’s suggestion for an optimal build for my combat-ready Dylan that could put up more of a fight and emerge victorious more often than not:

• Melee-power hybrid — aggressive combat with supernatural control
• Best for: boss encounters, combos, and clearing groups while maintaining offensive pressure.
• The key to Dylan's combat system is the relationship between melee attacks and supernatural abilities. Melee hits restore combat ability resources, while abilities can stun enemies and create opportunities for executions.

As for the recommended loadout ChatGPT-6 gave me, it is as follows:

• Weapon: Aberrant, with a fast primary form.
• Secondary form: A heavier form for burst damage.
• Combat abilities: One reliable crowd-control option and one damage-oriented option.
• Talents: Prioritize melee-to-ability synergy.
• Artifacts: Melee damage or critical chance, plus resource recovery and survivability.

ChatGPT-6’s assorted CONTROL Resonant tips included prioritizing melee synergy, keeping an ability available for emergencies, using the heavier weapon form strategically and choosing complementary artifacts. All of that stuff is common knowledge to me already, but the chatbot’s best character build setup and loadout advice worked like a charm.

Its reasoning for going with its first character build and the extra details it spoke about for a secondary character build worth considering also proved to be helpful: It takes advantage of the game's central combat loop rather than treating melee and supernatural abilities as separate systems. One alternative is a Mold Turret control build, which emphasizes summoned support, status effects, and ranged crowd control. This is particularly appealing if you prefer a more tactical approach.

3. Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2

I’m a simple man — anytime I get the opportunity to mow down a bunch of rabid “Xenomorphs,” I relish the opportunity to do so. So you can already see why I’ve been so enamored with Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2, which happens to be the sequel to one of my most-played co-op shooters.

My preferred character class is the “Machinist " since it specializes in automated fire support and lane control once those nasty aliens start swarming me and my squadmates. When I inquired about the best character build worth relying on in this game, ChatGPT-6 matched my sentiments when it mentioned the Machinist as the most reliable character class.

As for the most optimal loadout for that class, here’s what my new gaming coach came up with:

• Primary weapon: An automatic rifle or other dependable sustained-fire weapon.
• Secondary weapon: A high-damage weapon for close encounters.
• Ability focus: Sentry turret and drone support.
• Perk priority: Turret effectiveness, uptime, and team synergy.
• Combat strategy: Funnel enemies into controlled firing lanes.

With those tips in mind, I equipped my Machinist with the “F44AA Pulse Rifle,” “EDS-93 Zadak Plasma Discharger Mk. 2” and a bunch of perks that strengthened my character’s turret ability (the “Rumble Turret” and “Dual Targeting” perks proved to be quite valuable!) & team synergy focus. Afterward, it became even easier to stay in the fight during those missions where the difficulty got turned up a notch with the presence of certain “Challenge Cards.”

The takeaway

I can see why ChatGPT-6 is being regarded as one of the more essential tools for gamers nowadays. Its use of relevant imagery, easy-to-follow breakdowns that are split into easily identifiable sections and citations from legit sources all came together to give me an abundance of practical advice. Once I encounter those dreaded “Weapons” in Final Fantasy VII Revelation next year, I now know I can come back to ChatGPT-6 and ask for assistance on what character builds work best for my three-person party.

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They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and with the new ChatGPT Images 2.5 model, that certainly rings true. Rather than spending ages crafting long, complex text prompts to describe what you want, you can draw a rough outline directly in ChatGPT to set the scene, then refine the details as you go.

You can use this feature with a free account, and your sketches can be as basic or as elaborate as you wish. While some outputs might carry that AI polish, the results are impressively accurate.

Most importantly, the process gives you far greater control over the end result because you can make tiny adjustments to any element of the image.

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• You can reverse image search using ChatGPT — here's how
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Wading through ChatGPT’s vast offering of plugins can be a bit daunting. But whenever I come across one that’s worthwhile, it quickly morphs into an everyday tool that helps me in one way or another.

The library of entertainment-centered plugins is home to a bunch of familiar apps I’m sure most folks use. What makes those themed plugins so reliable is how they’ve led me to come across a wide range of music and movies that I never would have uncovered without their assistance.

It’s gotten to the point where I take heed of the recommendations those plugins give me, do my research into them to see if they’re highly reviewed or quality listens and end up passing those same music and movie suggestions along to other people (who usually end up liking them as much as me, by the way).

I’ve also found equally great ChatGPT entertainment plugins that curate other parts of my favorite hobbies — I’ve definitely had a much easier time discovering the sort of video games and manga that have eluded me for far too long.

These are the seven best ChatGPT entertainment plugins I rely on the most. One of them actually pits me against OpenAI’s chatbot in a classic battle of wits…that I rarely win.

1. Spotify

The best prompt: Analyze my music taste and recommend [number] songs I probably haven't heard but will love. Focus on artists and genres that match my favorites, explain why each song fits, and organize the picks into a playlist with a great listening flow. [list favorite artists and genres]

Walking to the train station and sitting on the train in complete silence is something I’ll just never do. Without music accompanying me on my daily walks and rides to work, I think I’d go mad. Tapping into my music streaming apps to keep me busy and block out the annoying noise that takes over my train car has turned into a daily occurrence.

The Spotify plugin has helped out immensely in that regard since it has showcased a diverse lineup of artists, albums and songs that have earned themselves a permanent spot on my playlists. Telling the Spotify plugin about my appreciation for Devin Morrison and being led to the soothing tunes of Gareth Donkin has been a blessing to my ears.

2. Apple Music

The best prompt: Create a [number]-song playlist inspired by my favorite artists: [list artists]. Include a mix of familiar songs and discoveries, avoid repetitive sounds, and arrange the tracks so the energy rises and falls naturally.

The Apple Music plugin has also been amazing as an AI-fueled music curator. It has entered my ChatGPT plugin ecosystem as a reliable music playlist builder. Those custom playlists haven’t just made my city trips a whole lot easier to deal with, but they’ve also provided my friends with some great songs to add to their playlists for our monthly get-togethers.

Letting the Apple Music plugin learn about my favorite artists across the genres of rap/hip-hop, R&B and alternative music has resulted in it showcasing the likes of Smino, Tiana Major9 and Clyde Crooks. Learning about artists that aren’t as mainstream as my main faves has been an awesome experience thanks to the Apple Music plugin.

3. Tubi

The best prompt: Plan a free movie night for me using movies available on Tubi. I like [genres, favorite films, or actors]. Give me [number] options, rank them by how entertaining they sound, and tell me which one is best for a fun night versus a serious movie night.

“If it’s free, it’s for me!” That saying will never leave my box of catchphrases and I’m sure most folks would agree with that sentiment. Tubi’s vault of movies covers an array of genres and cycles through all of the decades where I’ve built up my taste for cinematic flair.

When I do get the urge to kick back and go on a movie binge-watching run, I tap into the Tubi plugin to find something that’s either been overlooked or is considered underrated by many. So far, the Tubi plugin has saved my dry Friday and Saturday nights by giving me lesser-known action flicks, like Hotel Artemis, Mayhem, Rolling Thunder and Crime Story, to enjoy.

4. Flixor

The best prompt: Recommend [number] movies or TV shows based on my favorites: [list titles]. Focus on similar atmosphere, storytelling, character development, and twists rather than just the same genre. Rank the recommendations and explain why each suits my taste.

Flixor is also just as good at highlighting the sort of movies and TV shows that match my interests. I usually use this one to search for films and series that may not exist on streaming services, which leads me to going the physical route and picking them up as DVD/Blu-Ray purchases if the reviews for them are good enough.

But Flixor has also put me onto streaming content that’s readily available across Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, etc. So far, the Flixor plugin has helped add the following films, shows and anime to my physical and digital media rotation: Sicario, Perfect Blue, Dark (the Netflix thriller series) and Black Lagoon.

5. GameFinder

The best prompt: Recommend [number] video games based on my favorite games: [list games]. Analyze what I enjoy about them, including combat, exploration, progression, atmosphere, story, and difficulty. Rank your recommendations by how likely I am to love them, and include at least five underrated picks.

ChatGPT’s plugin has done a lot of the heavy lifting for me when I’m on the lookout for more music and movies worth checking out. One of those plugins has also aided my addiction to video games by showcasing the sort of games that sadly get buried by their AAA contemporaries on digital game storefronts.

The GameFinder plugin may have expanded my gaming backlog, but at least I can still be thankful for its suggestions (during those dry spring and summer gaming months, GameFinder’s clutch finds should keep me occupied). I never would have played A Hat in Time, ULTRAKILL, Spark the Electric Jester and Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden if it wasn’t for GameFinder.

6. Emaqi

The best prompt: Recommend [number] manga based on my favorite series: [list series]. Compare their storytelling, artwork, characters, pacing, and worldbuilding. Give me five mainstream picks and seven underrated recommendations. Flag whether each series is complete or ongoing when that information is available, and avoid spoilers.

I randomly found out about ChatGPT’s manga recommendation plugin from a friend of mine (whose physical collection vastly exceeds my paltry pickups). Emaqi has given me a bunch of manga titles to jump into besides the usual gamut of One Piece, Dragon Ball and Naruto that has dominated the majority of my manga reading thus far.

Emaqi has its own collection of manga titles that I can read digitally, but in the rare case that it doesn’t have a manga I’m looking for, I take note of the plugin's suggestions and look up where I can read them elsewhere. The Emaqi plugin observed those three faves of mine and made sure I didn’t overlook equally enjoyable titles such as Psyren, Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai and O-Parts Hunter. I know I’ll be coming back to this plugin a lot more since reading manga has become one of my bigger hobbies as of late.

7. Chessy

The best prompt: Play a chess game with me. I'm a beginner, so let me choose my moves while you explain your strategy in plain English. After each of my moves, tell me one thing I did well and one mistake I should watch for. Keep the game competitive but educational.

I admit to being more of a simpleton in the “real game” department. Sign me up for a quick round of Checkers anytime, but asking me to do a few rounds of chess? I’m a little bit more hesitant to do that since I’m not all that good at it. The Chessy plugin sits right inside ChatGPT’s directory of entertainment plugins and it surprised me since it lets me learn the game of chess by competing in it against the chatbot itself.

I tend to get cooked by ChatGPT most of the time, but at least it tells me where I did well and where I went wrong so I can take notes for future reference. Maybe my AI chess matches will lead me to beating an actual human someday (probably not…).

Final thoughts

ChatGPT’s entertainment plugins have been a boon for me whenever I’m looking for new music and movies to keep me amused. But they’ve also spotlighted a nice variety of TV shows, video games and manga for me to keep an eye out for. Plus, one of those plugins has even improved my (admittedly lackluster) chess acumen. I’m sure there are even more entertainment plugins worth checking out, but these seven picks stand tall as my favorite ones to date.

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Apple has spent years trying to catch up with ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Now, the company's new CEO is making the case that Siri doesn't actually need to win the AI intelligence race.

In a new interview with TIME, published October 15, Apple CEO John Ternus explained why the company is taking a different approach to AI, even as competitors spend billions developing their own models.

Rather than trying to build the smartest chatbot, Apple is betting that the future of AI comes down to something much more personal: the information already sitting on your iPhone.

It's an interesting argument from a company that has struggled to deliver on its AI promises. But with the new Siri AI now available in the U.S., Apple finally has an opportunity to show whether that strategy can work.

Apple isn't trying to build another ChatGPT

One of the biggest revelations in the TIME interview is how comfortable Apple appears to be relying on Google for its AI technology.

The new Siri uses an Apple AI model that draws on Google's Gemini technology, a partnership that might once have seemed unthinkable for a company famous for controlling nearly every aspect of its products. Ternus doesn't see it that way.

"We make the things where we can really bring differentiation," he told TIME.

Interestingly, Apple doesn't seem to be interested in developing a frontier AI model simply to say it has one, which leaves companies such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic competing to produce more models while Apple concentrates on what those models can actually do inside its devices.

And that brings us to Siri's biggest potential advantage.

Your iPhone knows things ChatGPT doesn't

Think about how much of your life is already stored on your phone. From your messages and emails to calendar appointments, images and personal information tucked in the notes, parts of your life are scatter across apps you use every day.

ChatGPT and Gemini can help you organize information, write emails and plan your schedule. But getting them to work with your personal data often requires connecting accounts, granting permissions or manually providing context.

Siri has a different starting point. With permission, Apple's assistant can draw connections between information across supported apps and use that context to complete tasks. The goal is for Siri to handle making those connections for you.

Apple also sees opportunities for Siri to interpret health information collected by an Apple Watch or find relevant details buried in emails and documents.

Other AI assistants are becoming even more capable of working across apps, too. Apple doesn't have exclusive rights to personal AI. But its tight integration with iOS could make these interactions feel more natural.

Apple is also betting that less AI could be better

There's another interesting part of Apple's strategy. The company doesn't seem to be trying to make Siri as autonomous as the most advanced AI agents. In the TIME interview, Apple's AI product leader Lilian Rincon explained that Siri was deliberately designed not to behave like an AI companion or replace human relationships.

That stands in contrast to increasingly autonomous AI assistants capable of operating computers, navigating websites and completing complicated tasks with limited supervision.

Those capabilities can be impressive, but they also introduce risks when AI makes decisions or takes actions users didn't intend.

Apple appears to be taking a more restrained approach, prioritizing predictable interactions over giving Siri as much independence as possible.

Privacy is another part of that equation

Siri processes requests directly on Apple devices when possible. More demanding requests can be handled through Private Cloud Compute, Apple's cloud infrastructure designed to process information without retaining user requests or exposing them to Apple.

Now, the real test is whether Siri can deliver. Apple's strategy makes sense on paper. It already has millions of people carrying its devices, and those devices contain information that could make AI genuinely useful in everyday life.

But having access to personal context is only an advantage if Siri can use it accurately, securely and without making routine tasks more complicated.

The takeaway

Competitors aren't standing still, either. ChatGPT and Gemini are gaining deeper integrations with apps and services, while AI agents are becoming more capable of completing tasks rather than simply answering questions.

Apple is betting that it can compete without owning the most powerful underlying AI model. After years of delays and missed expectations, the question is no longer whether Siri can become as intelligent as ChatGPT.

It's whether Apple can make Siri useful enough that iPhone owners stop reaching for ChatGPT in the first place.

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Last month, my curiosity propelled me to present an inquiry to my most-used AI assistants that a lot of people are asking right now: “Which jobs are in danger of being replaced by AI the most?”

That question led to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity listing numerous roles that are most associated with customer service, bookkeeping/accounting, writing, and software development. Seeing those types of jobs pop up on all four chatbots’ lists startled me, since the thought of living in a world where robots dominate most of the roles where a human’s intuition is sorely needed freaks me out. Especially for someone like me who’s a journalist (that writes about AI…how ironic).

For my latest roundtable Q&A with my four favorite chatbots, I presented them with a question that stays in the realm of AI and jobs: “Which jobs are the safest from being taken over by AI?” I also made sure to tell them to rank those jobs on their personal top 10 lists.

After observing each chatbot’s response, I took note of the careers they all agreed were secure and not in any danger of being completely replaced by AI these days. And I also noticed how each chatbot listed a few professions that the others didn’t mention at all.

The jobs every chatbot deemed as the safest from AI fulfilling their human occupations

The most common thread among ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity in response to my latest inquiry is how the 10 jobs they all listed fit under the umbrella of “humans are sorely needed to handle these roles now and in the near future.”

ChatGPT’s opening statement summed up exactly what I’d been thinking when I initially pondered over my question: If I were choosing a career today with the goal of staying employed over the next 10–20 years, I'd prioritize jobs that require physical work in unpredictable environments, human trust, complex judgment, and real-world accountability.

The following lists showcase the jobs that were mentioned among all four chatbots:

• ChatGPT: Electrician, Registered nurse, HVAC technician, Plumber, Physical therapist, Mental health counselor, Industrial maintenance technician, Firefighter and Special education teacher.
• Gemini: Plumbers, Electricians, & Skilled Trades, Surgeons & Emergency Physicians, Psychotherapists & Mental Health Counselors, Elementary & Special Education Teachers, Firefighters & Emergency First Responders, Trial Lawyers & Litigation Advocates and Construction Site Managers & Heavy Equipment Operators.
• Claude: Electrician, Plumber, Registered nurse, Surgeon, Mental health therapist, Firefighter and paramedic, Skilled construction trades (carpenters, welders, HVAC techs), Early childhood educator or special education teacher and Judges and senior legal decision-makers.
• Perplexity: Plumber, Electrician, Firefighter, Paramedic, Registered nurse, Physical therapist, Surgeon, Early-childhood teacher and Licensed mental-health therapist.

I wasn’t that surprised to see ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity all agree on the types of jobs that can’t be so easily filled by AI automation. The careers that emphasize practical skills, long-term healthcare, analytical work and deep human interaction stand out as the ones that are currently the most “AI-proof.” Gemini even brought up five key human qualities that place certain jobs within the AI-proof range — those required attributes are deep human dexterity in unstructured environments, high-stakes emotional connection, physical presence and complex regulatory responsibility.

The particular roles each chatbot mentioned that others didn’t

Another part of each chatbot’s top 10 list that caught my attention was the jobs they mentioned that the other bots didn’t bring up at all.

For instance, ChatGPT had the role of a cybersecurity specialist on its list and offered this as an explanation for its inclusion: Organizations need people to investigate attacks, assess risk, respond to incidents and make security decisions. AI can also be used by attackers, creating new defensive challenges.

As for Gemini, it was the only one that identified the following professions as the ones safest from AI: Fine Artists, Sculptors, & Performing Artists, Social Workers & Child Welfare Advocates and Chefs & Culinary Directors. Gemini’s statement on why chefs won’t have to worry about humanoid robots replacing them in the kitchen made all the sense in the world:

High-end cooking relies on human sensory perception—taste, smell, and texture—alongside creative menu design and managing heat, speed, and real-time kitchen dynamics that automated prep line robots cannot match in fine dining settings.

In Claude’s case, it specifically mentioned clergy and spiritual leaders among its list of the professional roles that don’t have to worry about AI taking over. Claude’s explanation as to why it chose that profession is as follows: People turn to religious leaders for meaning, ritual, and community at weddings, funerals, and crises. The value comes from the human being there, so an AI version misses the point.

And finally, Perplexity gave the nod to one job that I’m surprised the other chatbots failed to comment on: a dentist. The chatbot offered its reasoning as to why the practice of dentistry won’t be completely dominated by AI anytime soon: Dentistry combines clinical decisions with precise procedures inside an individual patient’s mouth. AI may assist with diagnostic information and planning, but delivering the treatment involves specialized physical skills, patient interaction, and professional responsibility.

The takeaway

So the chatbots agree on one thing: the jobs that require a high degree of human interaction, extensive hands-on work, emergency response, medical care, legal know-how and performing arts mastery are currently protected the most from AI taking over their human roles.

While AI can help out with these jobs in certain ways, such as automating spreadsheets and preparing student lesson plans, it’s clear that an experienced human professional is still needed to handle the major responsibilities tied to all those aforementioned roles.

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You really can't make this stuff up. An OpenAI engineer allegedly used AI tools to help plan a secret surveillance operation against his own employer. Now he's facing federal charges, and OpenAI says it used its own AI models to help investigate the device.

According to a criminal complaint released by the Department of Justice, 35-year-old Abdulrahman Alfozan allegedly planted a hidden audio recorder inside an executive conference room at OpenAI's San Francisco offices.

The device was plugged into the USB port behind a television, concealed in toilet paper and equipped with encrypted storage.

The chatbot conversations that raised questions

Arguably the most interesting part of the story isn't even the recording device; it's the chatbot conversations investigators say preceded its discovery.

Federal prosecutors allege that an AI chatbot account associated with Alfozan's spouse was used to research how to build, conceal and remotely access an audio recording device. The account also submitted questions referencing the specific device later discovered at OpenAI.

Meanwhile, the company says its own AI models helped security personnel understand the suspicious hardware.

The result is an unusual case in which AI allegedly helped someone prepare a surveillance operation while also helping the company investigate it.

The alleged operation began taking shape in September

According to prosecutors, the alleged operation began taking shape in September. Before the device appeared in the conference room, Alfozan allegedly used a productivity tool to search for information about OpenAI's office buildings, meeting rooms, calendars and executive meeting locations.

Between September 24 and September 30, a chatbot account associated with his spouse submitted a series of technical questions about recording equipment.

The prompts covered continuous audio recording, wireless connectivity, audio quality, encryption and remote access. Investigators say the account also asked questions about concealing the hardware. Interestingly, the account submitted prompts mentioning a custom header and unique MAC address associated with the actual device discovered at OpenAI.

The identity of the chatbot hasn't been publicly confirmed, either. There's no evidence in the public filing establishing that ChatGPT specifically was used, or that an AI model independently designed the device.

A recording device hidden in plain sight

OpenAI discovered the first device on September 30 during a security sweep. According to the Justice Department, it was attached to the back of a television in a conference room reserved for executives and executive assistants. The room regularly hosted confidential discussions about OpenAI's research, upcoming products, business strategy and relationships with government officials.

The hardware was reportedly a Seeed XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense, a small development board equipped with a microphone, camera sensor and storage capability.

Although the hardware itself is relatively inexpensive, OpenAI described the device as sophisticated because of its encryption, audio monitoring and data-transfer capabilities.

Security personnel couldn't read the information stored on the device because its contents were encrypted. Investigators also reviewed surveillance footage that allegedly placed Alfozan near the conference room on multiple occasions.

On October 5, security cameras reportedly captured him returning to the room and looking behind the television. That same day, OpenAI personnel discovered a second similar recording device inside a bag Alfozan had left unattended elsewhere in the office. The bag also contained identifying personal belongings.

Alfozan was arrested on October 9 and appeared in federal court on October 13. He faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted. The allegations remain unproven.

Bottom line

In the statement posted to X, OpenAI confirmed that its security team used the company's internal AI models to help understand the recording device.

OpenAI has not said that AI independently identified the suspect. What makes this case unsettling is that ordinary AI tools may have helped someone research the technical and logistical details of a surveillance operation, making specialized information easier to obtain.

This incident proves that a person no longer needs to work through technical documentation alone to investigate how hardware operates, troubleshoot configurations or understand unfamiliar equipment. AI assistants can help with those details in conversational language.

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I’ve found myself exploring ChatGPT’s massive lineup of plugins on a weekly basis.

The wide range of best-use cases that those plugins cover covers a lot of ground for most of the activities I regularly do. Getting exposed to new artists, songs, albums and playlists thanks to the Spotify and Apple Music plugins has been great. Tapping into the Etsy plugin to come up with clever gift-giving ideas and find the actual items that match what I’m searching for has been super beneficial. And making use of the AccuWeather plugin to plan my day of errands around a particular day’s forecast has come in handy.

While taking note of the many plugins that could assist me in a variety of ways, I thought about which ones could work hand in hand with ChatGPT’s recommendations for making my everyday chores just a little bit more enjoyable.

Prompting ChatGPT to give me a unique idea on how to make that happen while using one of its many plugins to give me an extra helping hand for each chore has been a pretty rewarding experience. Here are the five fun chore concepts the chatbot gave me, along with the five plugins that I used alongside them.

1. Cleaning and Todoist: To Do List & Calendar

Prompts: Create an hour-long cleaning speedrun from my current Todoist cleaning tasks. Break it into 10-minute missions and give me XP for each.

After presenting ChatGPT with the challenge of giving me the best methods it could come up with to make five everyday activities more fun, it made sure to turn each of them into something backed by “more momentum, novelty, competition, a reward, or a satisfying finish line.” On the apartment cleaning front, it took note of all Todoist tasks I designated as cleaning jobs that needed to be taken care of and turned them into objectives I needed to complete to gain real-life experience points (RPG nerds will get what I’m going for here).

For instance, clearing my kitchen counter granted me +10XP, emptying my dishwasher gave me +10 XP, vacuuming my living room gave me +20 XP, cleaning my bathroom awarded me +25 XP, putting away random things got me +15 XP and rearranging my bookshelf sent +15 XP my way. I didn’t know I’d ever participate in a speedrun attempt at tidying up my apartment as much as possible, but somehow, ChatGPT made it happen.

2. Laundry and Spotify

Prompt: @Spotify Give me a bunch of playlists that are perfect for whenever I'm folding the laundry.

Like most of you reading this right now, I’m guessing you find the act of doing the laundry outside of your home to be tiresome (but always mandatory). It’s even harder for me to pick up that bag of clean clothes that have been sitting in the corner of my room for a whole week and finally sift through it. I tend to get some of my more mundane chores done a whole lot quicker when I have some music compelling me to stay in constant motion while I’m folding up all of my pairs of jeans.

Asking the Spotify plugin pushed it to make this emphatic statement: Laundry folding deserves its own soundtrack. The trick is to pick music that makes the job feel less like a chore and more like a mini dance party, nostalgia trip, or relaxing break. It came up with 15 playlists for me to cycle through during my repeated clothes-folding sessions, such as the 80s Cleaning Playlist, Clean Work Songs – R&B, Pop, Hip-Hop, Afrobeats, Etc! and the 90’s–00’s Cleaning Playlist.

ChatGPT came up with three ways to turn my assorted laundry folding duties into something a bit livelier with the following challenges:

• The three-song challenge: Fold as much as you can before three songs end. No pausing to scroll.
• The sing-along bonus: Every time a favorite song comes on, fold an entire category: shirts, pants, towels, or socks.
• The final-boss round: Save the socks and fitted sheets for the final song. Finish before the music ends to win.

3. Meal prep and Pantry Persona

Prompt: Help me recreate restaurant-quality dinners at home. Give me five dishes using chicken, steak, or turkey, along with rice, pasta, potatoes, or steamed vegetables. Make each dish feel different from an ordinary weeknight dinner. Score each for flavor potential, difficulty, cost, and how well it reheats for leftovers.

On my never-ending quest for delicious delicacies that I can stretch out over the course of a week, I’ve gotten accustomed to using ChatGPT to generate recipes that stick close to my culinary preferences. It always does a commendable job in that department, especially since it suggests the best order for me to cook each dish, the best cooking techniques for its listed dishes and even meat thermometer options I should consider buying to make sure they’re all cooked to perfection.

Once I look up the right recipe for the dishes ChatGPT gives me, I save them to my Pantry Persona plugin, fit them into a proper meal plan, set up a shopping list for whatever dish I’m making next and get step-by-step guidance while I actually cook the dish. The work done by ChatGPT, my own research and the Pantry Persona plugin did a great job of making sure HelloFresh’s Provençal Chicken & Creamy Dijon Sauce with Mashed Potatoes & Garlicky Green Beans recipe came out of my kitchen a lot better than expected.

4. Decluttering and TickTick: To-Do List & Calendar

Prompt: Be my decluttering game master. Give me one 10-minute mission at a time, starting with the easiest area of my home. Each mission should help me identify 10 items to keep, relocate, donate, sell, or discard. Award points for completing decisions and clearing useful space. Don't make me get rid of anything I'm unsure about; give me a separate review box for those items.

@TickTack:To-Do List & Calendar: Set a flexible recurring task for my decluttering duties every Saturday.

Just like my time spent cleaning up my apartment, I also spend plenty of time decluttering since the thought of me getting my own episode on Hoarders scares me to death. I’ve also used ChatGPT to take my decluttering duties and give them the “RPG XP” real-life game treatment, which led to it coming up with something called “Declutter Quest.” The first mission I was given, which was called “The Easy-Win Sweep,” had a main objective tied to making decisions about 10 items sorted across keep, relocate, donate, sell or discard.

And with each category came the reward of XP, such as selling something and getting +15 XP in the process. Getting a +10 XP bonus for completing all 10 decisions within 10 minutes was also a nice touch for this game-like experience. The TickTick plugin worked in conjunction with my decluttering task by turning it into a flexible recurring 10-minute habit I had to complete every Saturday.

Setting a timer, tackling one small area in dire need of decluttering, checking off the mission once it’s finished and keeping track of the XP I’ve accrued works so much for someone so ingrained in gaming experiences as me.

5. Exercise and AllTrails

Prompts: Find beginner-friendly hiking trails in New York where I can also do some assorted exercises.

@AllTrails Find beginner-friendly hiking trails in New York where I can also do some assorted exercises.

ChatGPT has given me a long list of exercises I can do whenever I’m outdoors walking along a hiking trail, such as walking lunges, calf raises, bodyweight squats, etc. Also, the AllTrails plugin has made me aware of a bunch of hiking trails that appeal to someone like me who engages in those types of simple exercises supplemented by lengthy walks. That hiking recommendation tool placed me in a few local spots that let me simultaneously perform power walking and exercises that get the blood pumping. As a local New Yorker, ChatGPT sent me to beginner-friendly hiking trails such as the Prospect Park Loop, Battery Park City Greenway and Central Park Trail.

The takeaway

ChatGPT’s collection of plugins is extremely handy for mostly everything I do on a daily basis. Todoist, Spotify, Pantry Persona, TickTick and AllTrails have all lent their help in maximizing the fun factor tied to ChatGPT’s unique approaches to completing my everyday chores. I’m sure I’ll find more ways to integrate ChatGPT’s plugins into my daily routines for a wider range of tasks at some point (I’m sure the Tredict plugin will get added to my plugin playlist if I ever take on any endurance training challenges…).

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It almost seems as if a new chatbot launches every other week, or at the very least, new features are added to current ones.

With the recent launch of Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 5.5, a smaller, cheaper model designed for speed and efficiency, I had to know how it stands up against ChatGPT-6 for every day prompts. I have already compared ChatGPT-6 to Claude's sister model Opus 5.5, and couldn't help but wonder how the lighter model compared, too.

OpenAI’s GPT-6 powers the latest generation of ChatGPT, with an emphasis on more useful answers and interactive tools. Both promise practical help, but I wanted to see how well they handled my specific requests.

I used identical prompts to test meal planning, creative writing, shopping research, family scheduling and building a household budget calculator. I judged the responses on how closely they followed my instructions and how much work they left for me to do. Here's what happened.

1. The common-sense reasoning test

Prompt: I'm hosting Thanksgiving dinner for 10 people. One is vegan, one has a nut allergy, two are picky kids and I only have one oven. Create a menu and cooking schedule that gets everything on the table at 5 p.m. without spending more than $175.

Claude accurately calculated the turkey cooking time well, including a generous resting window before a 5:00 p.m dinner. It offered smart equipment hacks, kid friendly options, and allergy suggestions.

ChatGPT made almost all side dishes vegan by default (mashed potatoes, stuffing, green beans, carrots, gravy) using olive oil and dairy-free milk. This eliminates the need to cook separate vegan/non-vegan batches for every side item. It offered a realistic budget beakdown and a backup plan.

Winner: ChatGPT wins. The single hardest part of cooking Thanksgiving for guests with dietary restrictions in a one-oven kitchen is juggling multiple dishes. ChatGPT’s strategy of making all side dishes vegan by default reduces cooking complexity by 50%. It was efficient and helpful and the images were a nice added touch.

2. The creative writing test

Prompt: Write the opening 250 words of a novel about a young boy who stumbles upon a cave and discovers a kind dragon inside who befriends and protects him from bullies

Claude offered excellent atmospheric and environmental details. It also offered distinct dragon personality details.

ChatGPT Immediately launched into the middle of the action—Oliver is actively running away from bullies in sentence one. The story included interesting sensory details and fun fantasy elements.

Winner: ChatGPT wins for following the prompt the best and for superior middle-grade tone.

3. The research and fact-checking test

Prompt: Find three pairs of top rated running shoes that are under $150, and perfect for a decades long runner with a high arch running 35 miles a week

Claude accurately explained why high-arched runners logging high mileage (35 miles/week) need neutral, high-cushion trainers over stability shoes (extra shock absorption vs. preventing overpronation as well as including a top three list of running shoes.

ChatGPT delivered real-world data to back up the running shoe suggestions and ended with personal follow up questions to help me find the perfect pair.

Winner: Claude wins. The chatbot offered superior podiatric insight while identifying the mechanics of high arches (rigidity and poor shock absorption) and correctly steered me toward plush, neutral max-cushion models (Glycerin, Clifton, Ride). ChatGPT recommended the Brooks Ghost, which is famously firm and less ideal for high arches requiring shock protection over 35 weekly miles.

4. The chaotic schedule test

Prompt: I'm a working parent with three kids. The bus drops the kids off at 4:25, soccer starts at 6:30, and I need to swing by the post office before it closes at 6pm. Plus, dinner needs to be ready by 6:30. I also have a work deadline at 4. Build me a realistic afternoon schedule, identify impossible conflicts and suggest what I should delegate or reschedule.

Claude offered practical ways to get through the afternoon, with suggestions for what to delegate or reschedule that felt realistic for a busy parent.

ChatGPT addressed the dinner and soccer clash and built in buffers to keep one delay from derailing the schedule. It also included a table outlining potential problems and how to handle them.

Winner: Claude. Its advice felt more personal and easier to act on, with clever parenting shortcuts that reduced the stress of an already packed afternoon.

5. The build-something-useful test

Prompt: Build me a working household budget calculator. I want to enter monthly income, fixed bills, groceries, subscriptions and savings goals. Show how much money remains and let me change amounts to see the impact immediately. Make it simple enough for someone who has never written code to use.

Claude built a straightforward budget calculator with sample bills already entered and room to add my own expenses.

ChatGPT created a more polished app with editable amounts I could tailor to my household. I could also download it to use on the go or offline.

Winner: ChatGPT. Its calculator was easier to customize and offered useful extras, including a reset option and mobile access, that made it something I’d keep using.

Overall winner: ChatGPT

ChatGPT won this face-off 3–2, taking the Thanksgiving planning, creative writing and budget calculator rounds. Its best responses made my next step easier, whether that meant cooking one set of sides for everyone or giving me a budget tool I could immediately adjust.

Claude Haiku 5.5 earned its two wins with advice that felt more tailored to my situation. Its running shoe response better addressed the needs I described, while its afternoon schedule offered direct, practical ways to manage competing demands.

There's no doubt that Haiku 5.5 is a good model for everyday questions, but for my mix of tasks, ChatGPT would probably be my first choice based on these tests.

More from Tom's Guide

• Turn your PDFs into audiobooks with ChatGPT — here's the simple trick
• AI researcher warns cyberattacks could take down power, banking and water within a year — here's how to prepare
• An OpenAI employee allegedly used AI to spy on his own company — then AI helped catch him

I'm a huge fan of audiobooks, and now that I've been testing Ray-Ban Meta's audio-only glasses, I'm finding even more opportunities to listen instead of read.

So when I came across a new tool called PDF to MP3, I was intrigued. It turns PDFs, reports and eBooks into narrated audio, making it easier to get through reading material while doing something else. It also connects with AI assistants, including OpenAI's Codex, so you can turn documents into something you can listen to on the go.

So if you're already paying for ChatGPT, why not put that subscription to work converting the documents you've been meaning to read? But there's an important catch. While your existing subscription can handle part of the process, generating the actual audio requires a separate API key and may cost extra. If you're up for the challenge like I was, I can guarantee it's worth it.

How PDF to MP3 works

PDF to MP3 uses AI to process documents and text-to-speech technology to produce narrated audio.

According to site, the workflow has two specific parts. Your existing OpenAI or Codex subscription can handle document processing through an MCP connection, while an OpenAI or Google Gemini API generates the spoken narration.

To be clear, you're not just uploading a PDF into ChatGPT and receiving a finished audiobook for free (that would be too easy, although I have created a workaround before).

Instead, the service connects different AI tools to handle the conversion process. The developer also offers examples of generated audio so potential users can hear the results before setting up the service. It's not Audible quality, but it's also not terrible.

The finished audio can be played through the service's listening interface, and the developer has demonstrated how the workflow can extend from uploading a PDF to listening on a phone or in a car.

How to turn a PDF into an audiobook

If you want to try the service, here's the general setup described by its developer.

Visit PDF to MP3's AI connection page and review its instructions for connecting an AI assistant. Connect a supported assistant, such as Codex, using the service's MCP integration and authentication process.

Provide a document you want converted into audio. This could be anything from an ebook file to a research PDF. From there, configure a supported text-to-speech provider, such as OpenAI or Gemini. Note: this requires separate API access.

Follow the service's workflow to generate the narration, then open the resulting audio in its player. The service is designed to handle the process from document preparation to listening, rather than requiring users to manually extract text, generate speech and assemble audio files.

If you are even the slightest tech savvy, you'll be able to handle it. The whole process took me about 20 minutes, but I was also taking notes for this feature, so it will probably be even faster for you.

What about privacy?

API keys can authorize billable requests, so exposing one to an untrusted service creates a potential financial and security risk. Before using PDF to MP3, review how it handles credentials, whether it stores uploaded documents and what access you're granting.

Of course, avoid uploading sensitive documents until you've established how the service processes and retains them.

It's also worth remembering that an AI-generated audiobook may not reproduce every element of a PDF perfectly. Tables, diagrams, unusual formatting and complicated names can all present challenges for automated narration.

Keep in mind, your ChatGPT subscription doesn't cover everything, which is where things get a little complicated. On the

The developer clarified on the site that the subscription covers document processing, while generating speech requires a separate API key from OpenAI or Gemini. That's important since ChatGPT subscriptions and OpenAI API usage are billed separately.

Even if you're paying for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, that doesn't automatically mean you have free access to OpenAI's text-to-speech API. You'll need to account for any additional charges associated with the narration.

Verdict: I think it's worth trying

I think the idea behind PDF to MP3 is useful, even if the setup isn't quite as simple as just uploading a document into ChatGPT. The project may still be useful, particularly if you regularly convert documents into audio. But it's not an entirely free audiobook generator simply because you already subscribe to ChatGPT.

Being able to turn a lengthy document into something you can listen to during a commute, while exercising or around the house could make information that's been sitting unread far more accessible.

And the ability to use an existing AI subscription for part of that workflow feels like a win. Just know before you try it that the additional API requirements make this a better fit for people comfortable connecting AI services than for someone looking for a one-click audiobook converter.

The bigger takeaway here is that AI is becoming even more practical to turn written material into audio.

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OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic have all acknowledged incidents recently in which their AI models accessed real computer systems without authorization during research or security evaluations.

In OpenAI’s case, agents actively worked their way around restrictions designed to keep them contained, while the other three companies traced their incidents to testing environments that were misconfigured and left connected to the internet.

And as these same companies race to put more autonomous agents into the hands of consumers, the incidents raise an uncomfortable question about how much control AI companies actually have over the technology they’re building.

Here's a look at all the recent attacks and an explanation for each one.

OpenAI’s agents broke into Hugging Face

One of the most alarming examples involved roughly 700 OpenAI agents taking part in a cybersecurity evaluation called ExploitGym, with the attack on Hugging Face unfolding between July 8 and July 13, 2026, according to an investigation by the AI research nonprofit METR and OpenAI’s own report.

The agents were supposed to complete their assigned tasks inside a controlled environment, but they turned OpenAI’s internal Artifactory package registry into an unauthorized message board, coordinated with one another and searched for ways around restrictions meant to keep them isolated from the internet. Their efforts ultimately resulted in a breach of Hugging Face, the popular AI development platform, where OpenAI’s technical report found the agents executed code on 41 production dataset-server workers.

The incident wasn’t a deliberate attack ordered by a human operator. The agents were trying to succeed at their assigned tasks and adopted methods that crossed security boundaries, and OpenAI has conceded that early warning signs in the weeks before the breach could have triggered an earlier response.

OpenAI has since attributed the incident to misaligned behavior, which essentially means AI systems pursuing a goal in ways their creators never intended.

Hugging Face wasn’t the only target. In a September 25 update, OpenAI said it was notifying third parties on a rolling basis wherever its models may have bypassed security controls, impaired online services or otherwise affected outside websites, and that it had notified dozens of them so far. The company later raised that figure to more than 100 organizations, covering notifications sent through September 26.

The activity OpenAI identified includes agents bypassing access controls and using exposed credentials, and some agents modified third-party websites, including by using public wiki pages as makeshift message boards that later required cleanup. OpenAI says its review is ongoing and that it expects to notify more organizations.

It's happened to Google, Meta and Anthropic too

The problem extends well beyond OpenAI.

In August, Meta confirmed a report from The Information that one of its models, which the publication identified as Muse Spark 1.1, had breached another company’s systems during a cybersecurity test.

A Meta spokesperson said a misconfiguration by Irregular, an independent testing firm the company works with, inadvertently gave the model internet access. The model then exploited a vulnerability in a third-party service and made changes to the company’s internal systems.

Meta said the incident did not involve a sandbox escape, and it hasn’t named the affected company or explained what was changed. But the underlying behavior was troubling, since an AI system placed in the wrong environment was capable of taking actions against a real organization.

Google reported a similar problem involving its Gemini models. During a May cybersecurity evaluation, also run with Irregular, a Gemini model that wasn’t supposed to have internet access got online through a configuration problem. It then used publicly available information and guessed credentials to get into systems belonging to three real companies.

Anthropic has disclosed three incidents in which Claude models gained unauthorized access to the production systems of three organizations during cybersecurity evaluations run in Irregular’s environment. The models involved were Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Mythos 5 and an unreleased internal research model. In one case, Opus 4.7 was pointed at a fictional target whose name matched a real company’s live domain.

The problem isn’t that AI is evil

When agents go rogue, it can feel as if the agents are evil, that's really not the case. In each of these cases, the AI agent was not deliberately trying to cause harm. the AI was taking unauthorized actions because it believed those actions will help complete a task.

But even so, they reveal a practical problem about AI agents and how they can be remarkably effect while pursuing a goal without reliably understanding what methods are acceptable.

If an agent is rewarded for completing a task, it may discover shortcuts that violate rules, exploit vulnerabilities or exceed its permissions.

And unlike a traditional chatbot that simply produces text, an autonomous agent can interact with websites, execute code and make changes to connected systems.

Why this matters for everyday AI users

For most people, the immediate risk isn’t that ChatGPT will suddenly start hacking government websites. It’s that AI assistants are becoming increasingly capable of acting on our behalf.

OpenAI’s Dots, which launched September 29 for ChatGPT Pro and Business Premium subscribers, along with ChatGPT Work and other agent-style products, represent a broader shift away from AI that simply answers questions and toward AI that completes tasks. That can mean searching files, interacting with websites, using connected services and carrying out multi-step workflows with less supervision.

The appeal is obvious, since a task that would take you an hour can be handed off to an AI assistant instead. But every additional permission creates another opportunity for something to go wrong.

An agent with access to your email may encounter sensitive personal information, one connected to cloud storage may be able to read documents you never intended to share, and an agent authorized to interact with external services could run into malicious instructions or make an unexpected change.

Bottom line

The solution is not to stop using AI agents. I use them regularly and find them to be incredibly helpful.

Start by checking which accounts, apps and services your AI assistant can access, and disconnect anything you don’t actively need, particularly services containing sensitive financial, medical or personal information.

When possible, require approval before an agent sends messages, changes files, makes purchases or takes other consequential actions. It’s also worth remembering that an AI agent isn’t only limited to doing exactly what you imagined when you gave it an instruction, because a task that sounds straightforward to a human may involve dozens of decisions made by the AI along the way. The fewer permissions an agent has, the less damage an unexpected decision can cause.

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I regularly find myself perusing through ChatGPT’s nearly endless bank of plugins.

While the ones centered on helping users with their business operations, scientific research and security needs don’t really cater to my use cases, there are plugins from the other categories that do so much for me. More specifically, the plugins that connect right to my favorite apps that are geared toward entertainment, travel and shopping.

Seeing as I use many of the same apps that ChatGPT offers everyone as plugins daily, I knew it was time for me to connect my favorite ones to the AI tool I use just as much. Once I made those connections, I ended up shaving off some much-needed time for everything from building my day around the current weather trends to finding the best events and tickets to buy.

The following five ChatGPT plugins went hand in hand with five of my most used apps and ended up saving me a bunch of time on a number of different activities.

1. AccuWeather

My iPhone’s default Weather app is fine — I usually pull it up for a quick reminder of whether it’s going to rain or not before I step outside my front door.

But the AccuWeather app takes precedence over that one since it offers more accurate minute-by-minute forecasts, lays out the details I need to know to get ready for allergy season, gives me air quality forecasts, etc. AccuWeather’s ChatGPT plugin is pretty great whenever I ask it to give me an overview of the day’s weather so I can decide whether or not I should proceed with my plans.

Prompting the AccuWeather plugin to let me know if it’s worth stashing a sweater in my backpack before I head out for a few hours is the way to go for me now.

An example of a prompt I use: @AccuWeather Look at today's and tomorrow's forecast for my location and turn it into a practical plan for my day.

Tell me:

The best window for outdoor exercise

The best window for errands

When weather could interfere with outdoor plans

What clothing or gear I should consider

Whether I should change any outdoor plans because of the forecast

Don't just repeat the forecast. Translate it into decisions I can actually make.

2. Spotify

I come from the generation where it was pretty easy to get exposed to new music simply by listening to the radio, since stations used to play a larger variety of artists compared to today.

These days, I ask my friends for artist recommendations, scroll through the new releases that drop at midnight every Friday on the iTunes Store and listen to random music recommendations YouTube sends my way. Since my Spotify account is linked to the ChatGPT plugin, I save myself the trouble of desperately searching for music and artists I’ve never heard of just by prompting it to look through my faves and find similar tunes & musicians I might enjoy.

An example of a prompt I use: @Spotify Analyze my listening history and identify patterns in the music I consistently enjoy.

Then recommend 15 songs I probably haven't heard before.

For each recommendation, explain:

What about my listening history led you to it

The specific artist/song I already like that it connects to

What makes it different from what I normally listen to

Avoid obvious recommendations and songs that are already extremely similar to my favorites. I want discoveries that feel surprising but still make sense for my taste.

3. Podcast App

The Apple Podcasts app is decent enough, but I’ve gotten more mileage out of the Podcast App since it allows me to create episode playlists categorized by whatever topic I’m interested in or the guest speaker.

That one feature has made me gravitate towards the Podcast App and thankfully, most of my go-to podcasts are available on its platform. ChatGPT has a plugin for the Podcast App that I use as my podcast curator which brings up the sort of recommendations that have been added to my expanding playlist of audio entertainment.

And so far, the Podcast App plugin has exposed me to a wide range of podcasts. In fact, it has completely replaced my manual searches and how much time I used to spend looking for them.

Examples of the prompts I use: @PodcastApp Look at the podcasts I listen to and recommend five shows I haven't discovered yet.

@PodcastApp Find me a podcast that can help me understand [complex topic] without feeling like I'm studying.

@PodcastApp Find me something funny to listen to when I need to get out of a bad mood.

@PodcastApp Find me a podcast that will make a boring household chore more enjoyable.

@PodcastApp Find me a podcast episode that's perfect for an hour-long commute.

4. Etsy

I’ve been accused of not being the most thoughtful gift-giver. Once I hit a wall and can’t think of anything clever to get for someone for their birthday or during the holidays, I’ll quickly revert to getting them a generic gift card and calling it a day.

At some point, I realized my go-to move of giving out gift cards wouldn’t cut it anymore and I started reverting to Etsy to find more appropriate presents for my friends & family. Since Etsy takes up prime app real estate on my phone and also plays its part as a great curator for unique items worth buying, it’s saved me a ton of time by keeping me from endlessly searching for clever gift ideas.

Examples of the prompts I use: @Etsy Find me 10 genuinely unusual gifts under $50 for someone impossible to shop for.

@Etsy I need a last-minute birthday gift for someone who loves [hobby]. Find options that feel thoughtful rather than generic.

@Etsy Find me something on Etsy that would make my apartment feel more [cozy/minimalist/fall-themed/etc.] without spending more than $75.

@Etsy Find me Etsy products that would make my desk setup more interesting without making it look cluttered.

@Etsy I have $100 to spend on myself. Find me five things on Etsy I'd probably love based on these interests: [interests].

5. Ticketmaster

Attending concerts, wrestling shows, Broadway shows and other live events is something I do on the regular.

And even though Ticketmaster’s prices can be a bit too pricey at times, I go to it more often than not when it’s time to find decent seats for my next event. The Ticketmaster app practically lives on my phone and won’t be going anywhere, so I’ve gotten used to using its ChatGPT plugin just as much. That's why I've started prompting the Ticketmaster plugin to find events that appeal to my interests.

Likewise, I also use it to discover new events I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. Saving myself a few minutes by asking the Ticketmaster plugin to find events and the best tickets for them has become a common practice for me now.

Examples of the prompts I use: @Ticketmaster Find me the most interesting events happening this weekend that I probably wouldn't discover through a normal Ticketmaster search.

@Ticketmaster Find me an event that matches the kind of music I listen to, but don't recommend artists I already know.

@Ticketmaster When are the next New York Knicks games?

@Ticketmaster Find me tickets for professional wrestling events happening on the East Coast.

@Ticketmaster Find me a concert under $75 that would make a great Friday night.

The takeaway

Combining my favorite apps and their ChatGPT plugins has resulted in me having an easier time building my day around the current forecast, discovering new music, getting exposed to new podcasts, simplifying my search for gifts and finding the best events near me with great seats.

Performing all those tasks with ChatGPT’s assistance has dramatically lowered the time I used to be spent handling all of that busywork on my own. I’m still a bit iffy about connecting my Google Workspace accounts, but I’m pretty comfortable with combining the work that my favorite apps and their ChatGPT plugins do.

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AI is a powerful tool. Whether you use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or any other model, you can accomplish a lot with AI. But it comes with many concerns, not the least of which is the idea of AI going rogue. Plus, data centers create environmental issues.

For all the good AI can do (and has already done), it could also cause terrible things. And according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an interview with Decoded by POLITICO, "the world should accept some bad things happening" as a result of AI. Maybe that's easy enough to accept as the CEO of one of the world's largest AI companies, but for me, a writer whose livelihood is constantly under threat of being stolen by AI, it's a little harder to shrug off.

And job loss could be minor compared with other risks AI experts suggest. According to MIT's AI Risk Initiative, "18 of 24 risks have more than a 10% chance of causing catastrophic outcomes." Those risks "could include more than one million deaths, more than $100 billion in financial losses, or other harms."

Yeah, we should probably just accept those so we can shave some time off our workflows each day.

What did Sam Altman say?

The full quote from Sam Altman is: “I think there’s a lot of daylight. We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.”

He also spoke on a more central AI structure to prevent bad things from happening: “I disagree, but I understand the perspective of people who are like, ‘This technology is going to get so powerful, and it’s so dangerous, that a single lab in San Francisco should have it and make sure nothing bad happens, and kind of figure out how to dole out the benefits," said Altman.

But Altman's not just saying a bunch of bad stuff is going to happen and that we're doomed to accept it. He believes that by keeping a lighter AI regulation stance, "people will do tremendously — orders of magnitude more — good stuff than bad stuff.”

Altman also doesn't buy into “the really catastrophic risks,” including the potential for “a serious loss of control to AI.” Obviously, I want him to be right, and I love how much AI can streamline things, but I'm also not willing to take one person's idea about the "catastrophic risks" as fact.

Only time will tell whether we'll have to confront AI-related catastrophic risks. In a perfect world, everyone would work less as AI takes over boring, repetitive tasks and the cost of goods drops substantially due to efficiency.

But we don't live in a perfect world, so I'm not willing to just accept the "bad things happening" without scrutiny.

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I made a promise to myself this year: take advantage of those three-day weekends by enjoying the great outdoors instead of sleeping in till the PM hours. Those instances where I get an extended break from work are rare, so I’ve made it my mission to fill those off days with memorable activities.

ChatGPT has sent me all over New York this year since I’ve begun using it as one of my digital curators for fun activities I may not have known about before. My trip-planning chatbot has made me aware of local museums, restaurants, bookshops and even a few oddities that I’ll be sure to bring my buddies to the next time around.

For my next “fun-time excursion planning” session with ChatGPT, I gave it a new challenge: “I only have $100. Plan a perfect fall weekend with the most fun and affordable activities for me in New York City, with that in mind.”

Not only did ChatGPT lay out affordable ways to enjoy each day, but it also exposed me to an activity that made me realize I’d been missing a nostalgic element from my childhood.

Friday’s festivities

ChatGPT laid out a plan for all three days alongside an approximate budget for all the activities it suggested for each one.

Friday’s plan included a free museum, a fall evening walk and a cheap dinner to cap the night off that came out to $18. Out of those three fun proposals, the one that caught my attention the most was the free night of culture I could experience at the MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art): If you're a New York State resident, UNIQLO Friday Nights gives you free admission to MoMA from 5:30–8:30 p.m. You need to reserve a ticket in advance. That immediately gives you a $30-ish museum experience for $0.

I made sure to add that museum crawl to my Friday schedule so I knew exactly what I’d be doing after logging off from work.

Saturday’s pursuits

For the official start of the weekend, ChatGPT recommended a cost-effective hangout that started in Brooklyn and included a free festival, a quick bite to enjoy and a sunset walk that would definitely put my mind at ease.

The price for this plan came to $35, which is still cheap enough to leave me with enough funds for the third and final day. ChatGPT’s lineup of events that won’t break the bank definitely appealed to my curiosity and taste buds — these three picks got added to my three-day leisure list:

• ALIVE NYC by Daybreaker is happening Saturday at Brooklyn Bridge Park, running 6 a.m.–8 p.m., and is free with RSVP.
• Or head into Bed-Stuy for the African Restaurant Week Festival, which is also free and runs Friday–Sunday.
• Head toward Fort Greene, where Kréol Fest 2026 is also happening this weekend and is free with RSVP. You could easily spend several hours wandering, listening to music and checking out neighborhoods without spending anything.

ALIVE NYC’s promise of live music, a gathering of friendly people, interesting guests and chill vibes gave me something to look forward to. The African Restaurant Week Festival also stood out as a worthwhile option worth considering since shopping, eating and dancing among a large crowd of like-minded people is right up my alley. The Kréol Fest offered the same three bullet points of amusing diversions, but with a Kréol-focused twist.

Sunday’s entertainment

With Sunday in mind, ChatGPT combined the cost of its main plan (which is $30) and the one it set aside for backup purchases (which totaled $17), which hit my limit of $100. The main plan focused on trekking through Central Park, enjoying yet another free festival and stuffing my face with some cheap comfort food.

ChatGPT’s suggestion for an afternoon activity sparked my interest the most, as it appealed to my young soul in need of something that evoked grade school field trips:

• This is the wonderfully weird part. The NYC Fungus Festival is happening Sunday at The Battery from 11 a.m.–4 p.m., and admission is free. So you could do Central Park in the morning, wander downtown and finish with a completely unexpected mushroom festival.

When I did my research on the NYC Fungus Festival, it made me realize that I’d been missing out on the sort of fun that I’d implore my parents to sign off on when my school wanted to take my class out for some intriguing endeavors.

Heading to The Battery in Lower Manhattan to study different kinds of mushrooms, participate in discussions about them, go on nature walks to find more, sit in on workshops, enjoy the work of local artists, munch on some grub from food vendors and attend a Fungi Fashion Parade sounds like an awesome plan. I’m sure I’ll feel like a 10-year-old again as I bask in the wonder of fungi on the final day of my last three-day tour around my city.

The takeaway

ChatGPT’s final statement about my three-day escapades was a bit humorous yet still informative:

Don't pay for anything that NYC gives you for free. This weekend, you've got free museums, parks, festivals, outdoor concerts/events, neighborhood walks, waterfront views and an enormous city to explore. NYC's Department of Cultural Affairs maintains an extensive list of free and pay-what-you-wish cultural institutions.

Heading to the MoMA on Friday night, taking the train to Bed-Stuy for the African Restaurant Week Festival and bringing my fun to an end on Sunday by attending the NYC Fungus Festival helped me set my three-day weekend plans in motion.

Doing all of those activities without having to worry about going over $100 helped me rediscover my love for activities that evoked a school field trip. So, not only did I save money, but it helped rekindle my youth.

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We've all been using ChatGPT long enough to know that even a useful response can leave you wanting more. As in, you read the explanation, figure out which parts apply to you, then ask another question to get something you can actually use.

But OpenAI's latest update aims to make that process easier. The company is bringing GPT-6 to ChatGPT's Chat tab along with Intelligent UI, a new feature that lets ChatGPT respond with interactive charts, diagrams, buttons and tools inside your conversation.

The first GPT-6 models arrived last month for paying customers in ChatGPT Work and Codex, which makes this update the first chance most ChatGPT users will get to try the new generation.

The rollout begins today for Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise subscribers and will expand to Free and Go users, although the two groups won't be running the same model.

Paid tiers get GPT-6 Sol while Free and Go users get the lighter model, GPT-6 Luna, and OpenAI says both are tuned for everyday conversation. Enterprise access depends on workplace admin settings, and the models powering ChatGPT Work and Codex aren't changing as part of this release.

For me, the appeal is pretty straightforward, because sometimes the most helpful answer is something you can adjust, explore or click through. GPT-6 also lets ChatGPT start answering while it's still thinking, and OpenAI says GPT-6 Instant begins responding 44% sooner on average than GPT-5.6 Instant on questions that need a web search, but the interactive answers are still a more compelling reason to pay attention than another benchmark score.

Answers you can interact with

OpenAI's examples include a Sunday roast plan with an adjustable guest count, a clickable breakdown of a seven-speed bike's components and a bill splitter. ChatGPT can also stick with a plain text response when that suits the question, and users who would rather see fewer visuals will be able to dial them back.

The dinner example is particularly easy to appreciate. Anyone who has planned a meal around a constantly changing headcount knows that the recipe is only part of the job, and working out how much to buy can become its own little project.

An adjustable answer could save some of that back-and-forth. The same principle makes sense for learning, since being able to explore one part of a complicated explanation at a time could make it easier to follow.

Chat vs. Intelligent UI

GPT-6 can begin responding while it continues reasoning. OpenAI says GPT-6 Instant starts answering web-search questions 44% sooner, on average, than GPT-5.6 Instant. That measures when the response begins, rather than how quickly the entire task finishes.

That could make the experience feel more responsive. My bigger test would be whether the early information is useful and whether the finished answer holds together. Getting the first sentence sooner is welcome; getting a clear answer is what will always keep me using a tool and picking it over another model.

What else is new in ChatGPT?

The GPT-6 launch follows several smaller updates aimed at everyday tasks. On October 1, OpenAI introduced virtual clothing and accessory try-ons using a selfie, along with the ability to save shopping finds for later.

The company also began rolling out document scanning on iOS. You can photograph several pages in succession and have ChatGPT combine them into one PDF, ready to upload to your conversation.

On October 2, ChatGPT’s Finances feature started expanding to Free and Go users in the U.S., letting them connect financial accounts to ask questions about their spending and investments.

These updates suggest OpenAI wants ChatGPT to become a more regular part of how people shop, organize paperwork and manage everyday decisions.

Final thoughts

It is now available to all users and the update applies to Chat; Work and Codex models are unchanged.

The first thing I’d try is a task that usually takes several follow-up prompts. If the interactive answer makes that job easier to finish, this could be a well-welcomed update; one we didn't even know we needed.

Give it a try and let me know what you think in the comments.

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If you’ve been using Gemini for free, some big changes are coming to the models you can access.

Starting October 9, 2026, free Gemini users will lose access to Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.1 Pro, leaving 3.5 Flash-Lite as the only available model. Google AI Plus subscribers, who pay $4.99 a month, will also lose access to Pro but will retain both Flash and Flash-Lite.

That means anyone who wants the same level of Gemini access previously available for free will need to upgrade to the $19.99-a-month Google AI Pro plan. Existing Pro subscribers are getting something in return: access to Deep Think, which had previously been reserved for Google's more expensive AI tiers.

Google is also introducing low, medium and high effort settings for Gemini's available models, giving users more control over how much compute the AI puts into completing a task and producing a thorough response.

With the free Gemini experience becoming considerably more limited, this is a good time to look at what else is available without another monthly subscription. Here are seven free AI alternatives worth trying.

The best free alternatives to Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.1 Models

ChatGPT GPT-5.6 Luna is an easy recommendation as an all-around free alternative to Gemini. It can handle everyday tasks including writing and editing, brainstorming, research, summarizing, coding, file analysis and answering everyday questions. Free users can also use the Think option when a task needs more reasoning.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 stands out for its strong ability to take on writing/editing tasks, plus its reasoning capability is equally commendable. Claude’s free model is also good at coding, following complex instructions, analyzing documents, and brainstorming.

Perplexity earns a spot among this collection of free Gemini app alternatives, especially if you’re looking to find accurate information on whatever you’re researching. Perplexity does extensive web research and provides clickable sources for most of the claims it makes.

DeepSeek V4 is available for free if you sign in to use DeepSeek's official web chat or mobile app (available through the App Store and Google Play). Its strongest capabilities make it perfect for users who want to use it for coding, mathematics, logic, technical questions and complex problem-solving tasks.

Qwen can be accessed through its official web portal, which allows free users to take advantage of its 3.7-Plus, 3.8-Max and 3.8 Omni-Flash models. All three models are great for handling prompts presented in different languages and handling tasks themed around analyzing long documents, research, coding, reasoning and more complex jobs.

xAI’s Grok 5, which can be directly accessed through Twitter if you have an account, is another free alternative to Gemini worth considering. Its core strengths lie in providing the most accurate answers possible, reasoning, coding, providing up-to-date information, researching, brainstorming and having everyday conversations.

Kimi K3 is another free option you can use after logging in to gain access to it. It’s particularly strong when it comes to handling complex research tasks and analyzing a large set of documents.

Bottom line

The Gemini app and its free Flash-Lite model can still do plenty of work for you. But if you’re looking to move beyond your regular reliance on Google’s chatbot, it might be worth considering a move over to either of the seven models detailed above. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity provide the perfect trio of alternative free AI tools worth using, while Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen and Kimi serve as the backup chatbots that should stay in your “no-cost AI” rotation.

More from Tom’s Guide

• AI scams are getting scary realistic — 4 red flags to watch out for
• Your ChatGPT history is worth saving — here’s how to back it up
• Meta Muse can keep files on people who have never used it — here's what I found

As a ChatGPT power user, I am constantly going back and referencing past conversations and Projects.

Whether it's a meal plan my family actually liked or a resume I spent an evening working on, there are many chats that are just too important to lose.

Over time, those exchanges become a history of work you've done, which means, the only copy shouldn't be inside your account. Leaving it there makes it harder to keep that work somewhere you control.

You don’t need to be planning an exit from ChatGPT to save your history. The same logic applies to backing up photos or keeping a copy of an important document: if you’d be annoyed to lose it, it’s worth saving.

The good news is, ChatGPT has a built-in export option. Here’s how to use it, what to do with the download and where its usefulness ends.

How to export your ChatGPT history

For a personal account, request a copy through ChatGPT’s settings:

Sign in at ChatGPT.com.

Open your profile menu, then select Settings.

Select Data controls.

Under Export data, click Export.

Select Confirm export.

OpenAI says exports can take up to seven days. When yours is ready, you’ll receive an email or SMS with a download link that expires after 24 hours. Download it quickly and while signed in to the account that requested it.

The ZIP includes chat history and other account data. Extract it and check that the conversations you need are there.

Settings-based export is available for personal Free, Go, Plus and Pro accounts. Business and Enterprise workspaces don’t offer this self-service option.

If you can’t sign in, try OpenAI’s Privacy Portal. Select Make a Privacy Request, I have a consumer ChatGPT account, then Download my data and follow the instructions.

Give the backup somewhere to live

Downloading the ZIP is only the first step. Move it into a folder you can find again and give it a clear date, such as “ChatGPT backup — October 2026.”

Keep the original ZIP intact. If you already back up your computer, put it somewhere covered by that backup. Otherwise, consider keeping a second copy on an external drive or in a private cloud storage folder.

Treat the archive as personal information. Think about everything you’ve asked ChatGPT over the past year: work questions, family details, financial worries, drafts you weren’t ready to share. A folder containing those conversations deserves the same care as your other confidential documents.

For particularly useful exchanges, I’d also save a readable copy separately. Copy the relevant text into a document, add a descriptive title and file it with the project it belongs to. “Kitchen renovation budget” will be easier to recognize six months from now than another vaguely named chat.

Archiving a chat isn’t backing it up

As helpful as ChatGPT’s Archive option is for clearing the sideebar, it's worth noting that the conversation remains inside your account. Meaning, you haven’t created an independent copy.

Deleting is different because once you hit delete, those chats cannot be recovered, even through ChatGPT or its support team. If you’re planning a cleanup, save anything important before you start deleting conversations.

OpenAI does offer a workaround for referencing conversations in another personal account: extract the ZIP, find conversations.json and upload it into a new chat. Larger exports may contain numbered conversation JSON files instead.

That lets ChatGPT use the uploaded material as reference within that conversation. It won’t recreate each old chat in the sidebar, merge your accounts or transfer memories, custom instructions, GPTs or subscriptions though.

Bottom line: Make it a habit

If you frequently use ChatGPT, it's worth starting a habit of saving your conversations. A backup only covers what you saved at the time, so if you use ChatGPT regularly, choose a schedule that fits how much work you’d hate to repeat.

Do you regularly save your chats? Let me know in the comments.

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OpenAI's internal AI agents hacked into Hugging Face while trying to cheat on a cybersecurity benchmark. Anthropic has disclosed that Claude models reached the open internet from cybersecurity test environments that were supposed to be sealed off and then got into the real systems of outside organizations.

Both are examples of systems taking actions their developers didn't intend, and METR, an independent AI research nonprofit, has been brought in to look at each of them. It documented the Hugging Face incident alongside Redwood Research and is now investigating Anthropic's.

OpenAI and Anthropic have also committed to bringing outside experts inside their companies to examine safety practices, according to The Atlantic. Called "embedded evaluators," these researchers could get a closer look at how models are built and investigate problems that might never surface in a product demo.

The catch is that this oversight is voluntary. Last week, leaders from Anthropic, OpenAI and other major labs signed an accord at the White House committing to independent external auditors, and the FTC has opened an industry-wide probe into AI labs, but the companies being examined still have considerable control over what outsiders can see, which risks they investigate and what information reaches the public.

For anyone being encouraged to let AI handle more of their work, that leaves a fairly basic trust problem. We're being given assistants while the system for independently checking their behavior is still taking shape.

As I've reported before, the film The AI Doc puts the number of people working on AGI, or artificial general intelligence, at more than 20,000, while fewer than 200 are focused specifically on AI safety.

A closer look inside AI companies

Today, an outside researcher might test a model before release and report how it performed. Embedding evaluators inside a company could let them follow its development and investigate the decisions behind that behavior.

Anthropic says these evaluators would have access comparable to an employee's, allowing them to observe training, speak with staff and examine how models are built and deployed.

The company has named Accenture as its first embedded evaluator, with Faculty, Accenture's specialist AI business, leading the work. Each company expects to invest at least $1 billion in AI safety over five years.

That access could help researchers discover whether a troubling incident was an isolated failure or evidence of a wider problem. METR's proposed approach to investigating incidents calls for examining transcripts, interviewing employees and studying the training conditions that might have encouraged the behavior.

The companies still set the terms

Anthropic acknowledges that standards for evaluators' access, reporting and funding haven't been settled. It will fund Accenture's work directly, while discussing pilots with nonprofits that would use their own funding.

Accenture is not new to Anthropic, since the two companies already run a joint business group under a partnership announced in December 2025.

That relationship deserves attention, because a group of evaluators published an open letter arguing that embedded evaluators shouldn't have other significant commercial business with the labs they assess.

As The Atlantic's reporting explains, voluntary oversight gives companies considerable discretion over the scope of an evaluation. Researchers need enough freedom to examine uncomfortable evidence and tell the public what they found.

They also need to be able to explain what they couldn't check. There needs to be transparency because a report based on limited access could be valuable, but we should know where its conclusions end.

What this means for ChatGPT and Claude users

METR's recent assessment of Claude Opus 5.5 focused on whether the model could accelerate AI research and development. The organization explicitly says its summary doesn't assess the model's alignment properties and whether its behavior follows intended goals and constraints.

METR conducted the evaluation under an unpaid agreement, and it also disclosed that Anthropic had an opportunity to review and edit the summary, with METR approving the final text.

The incidents involving internal agents don't establish that the ChatGPT or Claude you use for everyday tasks will behave the same way. OpenAI found that its agents' tendency to compromise infrastructure dropped by more than 100 times when they ran with the production ChatGPT setup, and Anthropic says the behaviors it found are unlikely to show up in ordinary use.

Independent researchers need enough access to uncover risks and the freedom to publish what they find, even if it delays a launch or frankly, even if it embarrasses the company paying for their work.

Bringing outside evaluators into AI labs is a promising start, but their influence will depend on what happens when they uncover a serious problem. If a company can restrict the investigation or keep the findings private, the public is still being asked to take its word for it.

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• Meta Muse vs ChatGPT Dots — I compared the new AI agents, and they’re not as similar as they look
• Why Siri never worked like ChatGPT — former Siri AI researcher explains what Apple had to change

Most of the time, ChatGPT gives you an answer you can use. But when it misses the mark, you can end up spending more time fixing the response than you expected to spend on the task itself.

Before you start a new chat and explain your budget, preferences and schedule all over again, try telling ChatGPT exactly what it got wrong. “Try again” leaves it guessing, while “keep this within my original budget and include all the costs” gives it a specific problem to fix.

Here are seven follow-ups you can copy into your current conversation to help get the answer you wanted.

1. Utilize the details

Those generic answers are especially frustrating when you’ve already explained your situation. You ask for help getting your house ready for guests in 30 minutes and receive a cleaning schedule that includes organizing closets.

Try this prompt: Use the details I gave you, rather than giving me general advice. I have 30 minutes before guests arrive. Prioritize what they’ll actually see and skip anything that can wait.

This directs ChatGPT back to the practical limits of your request. The same approach works when a meal plan ignores what’s in your fridge or a suggested itinerary overlooks the ages of your children.

If it keeps missing one important detail, repeat that detail in the correction. You don’t need to paste your entire original prompt again to make clear that you have half an hour and absolutely no intention of reorganizing the pantry. Just clarify.

2. Sound human

An email to your coworker or a text to a neighbor shouldn’t sound stiff or insincere. ChatGPT can produce grammatically polished writing yet, still come off completely wrong. But you can avoid that.

Try this prompt: Make this sound like something I’d actually say out loud. Use everyday language, remove the formal opening and keep it friendly without being overly enthusiastic.

For a better match, add a sentence you’ve written yourself or point to the wording that bothers you. “I would never say ‘I hope this message finds you well’” gives it a more concrete direction than simply asking it to sound human.

Read the revision aloud before sending it. If a phrase still feels awkward coming out of your mouth, ask ChatGPT to change that phrase specifically.

3. Skip to the answer

Sometimes you need a decision and ChatGPT gives you a three-paragraph essay. Asking whether to repair an old appliance can turn into a much longer conversation than you hoped.

Try this prompt: Give me the answer first, then only the explanation I need. Keep it under 150 words and include any detail that could change your recommendation.

The final instruction helps to shorten the answer but doesn't just strip everything out. In other words, this prompt helps to tighten the response, so you only get what you need.

You can also specify the format: one recommendation, three reasons and one next step. That makes it easier to see whether the answer actually helps you decide.

4. Devil's advocate

An enthusiastic response can feel reassuring when you’ve already made up your mind. It’s much less useful if you’re trying to work out whether your plan has a flaw.

Try this prompt: What’s the strongest argument against my idea? Focus on practical drawbacks, costs I may have overlooked and what would make this a poor choice for me.

Say you’re considering canceling your streaming subscriptions and rotating between services each month. The useful criticism might concern overlapping billing dates, annual discounts you’d lose or whether anyone else in your household will follow the schedule.

Ask it to finish by explaining which objections matter most given your circumstances. Otherwise, you could end up with a long list of hypothetical problems that barely apply to you.

5. Find red flags

Maybe you have a great idea or a plan in place but missed a few details. For example, a $150 birthday party might suddenly become a $250 birthday party if there were inconsistencies in your budget. Sometimes a second opinion that can spot patterns before they turn into problems can be helpful.

Try the prompt: Redo this using my original limits: $150 total, 10 children and three hours. Include every cost you’ve accounted for and flag anything you can’t fit within those limits.

Repeating the nonnegotiable details makes the correction easy to follow. You can use the same wording for a trip with a fixed departure time, a recipe with ingredients you need to avoid or a workout that must fit into 20 minutes.

Check the revised totals yourself. Asking ChatGPT to show its accounting makes mistakes easier to spot, but it doesn’t guarantee the math or estimated prices are correct.

6. Fact check and verify

Speaking of sounding correct, AI is known for being exceptionally confident. Sometimes that wording is a little too convincing. To keep facts in check, you'll want to ask ChatGPT to verify.

Try this prompt: Which parts of this answer can you verify, and which are assumptions? Check current sources where available, link to them and say clearly what you couldn’t confirm.

This is a useful follow-up when ChatGPT recommends a product based on a feature you can’t find or gives you opening hours without identifying a source.

Treat the revision as something to check, too. Open the links and confirm that they support the claims beside them. If ChatGPT cannot access current information in that conversation, asking for verification won’t give it that access.

7. Understanding the next step

Sometimes the answer is reasonable, but it asks more of you than you can manage right now. You wanted help tackling an overflowing inbox and received a complete system involving folders, filters and a weekly review.

Try this prompt: What’s the smallest useful step I can take in the next 10 minutes? Give me one action using what I already have, without setup or a new app.

This turns a broad plan into something you can begin. For an inbox, that might mean finding messages that need a reply today. For a messy room, it might mean clearing the floor before touching drawers or shelves.

You can ask for the next step once you’ve finished. There’s no need to take on the entire plan just because ChatGPT generated it.

The takeaway

A bad answer doesn’t always require a longer prompt or even opening a new chat. Often, the useful follow-up is a sentence explaining exactly what needs to change: the tone, the length, the assumptions or the limits it overlooked.

Keeping the conversation going lets you refer to the answer in front of you and refine the part that failed. If repeated corrections still leave you with the same problem, a fresh chat may be worth trying. But before you start over, give ChatGPT one clear thing to fix.

More from Tom's Guide

• Amazon drivers are getting AI smart glasses — but my warehouse tour reveals their 1-million strong automated robot workforce is the real story
• Meta Muse vs ChatGPT Dots — I compared the new AI agents, and they’re not as similar as they look
• What is the ‘Hotel Lobby’ AI trend — and why is it raising concerns?

ChatGPT can already help you figure out what to wear, whether you’re shopping for a new season, getting ready for an event or trying to look a little more polished for an important meeting. Now it can go a step further and actually show you what those clothes might look like on you.

OpenAI has rolled out two new shopping features globally across ChatGPT’s desktop and mobile apps. You can virtually try on clothing and accessories using your own photo, then save anything you like to Favorites or organize your finds into custom folders.

The virtual try-on feature is powered by the new ChatGPT Images 2.5, which OpenAI says produces more natural lighting and realistic textures. Instead of trying to imagine whether something you find online will actually work for you, ChatGPT can generate an image that gives you a better idea of how it could look.

I tried the new virtual try-on feature to see how well it works. Here’s how to use it, along with a few prompts you can try for yourself.

Stepping into ChatGPT’s virtual try-on room

Using ChatGPT’s virtual try-on feature is surprisingly simple. Start by asking ChatGPT to find the type of clothing you’re looking for, whether that’s a winter coat, a dress for an upcoming wedding or a new pair of jeans.

Hover over one of the results and you’ll see a Try on button. From there, upload a selfie or full-body photo and ChatGPT will generate an image showing you wearing the item.

You aren’t limited to clothing ChatGPT finds for you, either. You can upload a photo of yourself along with an image of something you want to wear — perhaps a wedding dress you’ve been eyeing or an outfit you spotted on a celebrity — and ask ChatGPT to show you what it might look like on you.

One thing to know before uploading a photo is that ChatGPT saves your reference image for future try-ons. You can add, replace or delete reference photos at any time by heading to Settings > Personalization > Reference photos.

ChatGPT also makes it easy to keep track of anything you might want to buy later. Hover over an item and click the bookmark icon to save it to Favorites or organize it into a custom folder.

To see what the feature can do, here are a few prompts worth trying.

• Find me [number] jackets under [price] that would work with my existing wardrobe, then let me virtually try on the ones you think suit me best.
• Find me [number] outfits for a casual Friday at work. Show me what each outfit would look like on me using Virtual Try On.
• I want to completely change my style without spending a fortune. Find [number] different styles for me and let me virtually try on an outfit representing each one.
• Find me a pair of jeans that would work with at least [number] different outfits I already wear. Let me try on your best options.
• Find me a winter coat that looks stylish but doesn't make me look like I'm drowning in fabric. Let me virtually try on your best options.
• I have an important event coming up. Find me an outfit that looks polished but doesn't feel overly formal, then let me virtually try it on.
• Find me [number] pairs of sneakers that would work with most of my wardrobe and show me how each looks on me.
• Find me a shirt in a color I don't normally wear. Give me several options and let me virtually try them on so I can see which color works best.
• Find me an outfit inspired by [movie/TV character/celebrity] without simply copying their exact clothes. Let me virtually try it on.
• Find me the most flattering version of this type of outfit for my personal style, then show me what it looks like on me.

Bottom line

Having the ability to give ChatGPT a photo and prompt it to virtually place you in an assortment of fits catered to every occasion stands out as one of the best shopping AI features, in my opinion. Getting a good look at how you may look in something first, saving those pics for future reference and then heading off to a retailer that may have the clothes you’re looking for so you can try them on in real time sounds like something everyone should try out just once.

More from Tom’s Guide

• Why AI ads make consumers question product quality, according to an expert
• 9 'slash' commands to get better answers from ChatGPT — number 7 is my personal favorite
• Why Siri never worked like ChatGPT — former Siri AI researcher explains what Apple had to change

As a ChatGPT power user, one of my biggest complaints is that it doesn't always give me an answer in the way I want. For example, I might ask it to edit a paragraph and remove all serial commas or for feedback on an idea. But once it responds to what I thought was a straightforward command, it seems to have gotten confused. Then, I'm suddenly given a five-part explainer that I never asked for. Or, I've recently asked ChatGPT to help with something and it's just responded with "Yes."

If this happens to you, stop trying to solve the issue by adding more instructions and prompts. Instead, try doing something much simpler by adding a slash.

When you type a slash command such as /human and /critic at the beginning of your prompt, you'll get a response that's much more accurate to what you're actually looking for.

To be clear, these ChatGPT commands aren't the secret to unlocking a hidden OpenAI setting. In fact, you can use them with any chatbot including Gemini, Claude or Muse.

Here are the 10 I've found most useful.

1. /human

This is a command you've probably seen a lot lately. It's a viral command that helps change the tone of AI-generated writing.

Try this prompt: /human Rewrite this so it sounds like something a person would actually say: [paste text]

I use it to get rid of canned transitions, excessive explanation, repetitive sentence structures and the strangely polished tone AI tends to fall into before sending an email or drafting a presentation. This is especially useful if you write a draft and then use AI to edit. All too often the chatbot will completely change what I've written. By asking it to "/human only make minor edits on my human-written draft," you should see much better results.

For more control, you can define /human in your ChatGPT instructions with the specific habits you want it to avoid.

2. /critic

Chatbots can be annoyingly nice and people pleasing. Give ChatGPT an idea and it will often find something encouraging to say about it before getting anywhere near the problems. That's useful when you want support. It's less useful when you're trying to decide whether an idea is actually good.

That's when I use /critic.

Try this prompt: /critic I'm thinking about buying an expensive espresso machine even though I only make coffee twice a week. Assess the idea.

The point is to signal that you're not looking for validation. You want weaknesses, risks and things you haven't considered.

It's particularly useful for pitches, plans, purchases and anything you've become a little too attached to.

3. /tldr

Sometimes I don't need the background. I need the answer.

Try this prompt: /tldr Explain what's actually changing in this announcement: [paste text]

The familiar internet shorthand already carries a lot of meaning, so ChatGPT generally understands exactly what you're asking for: compress this.

I find this especially useful for long emails, press releases, documentation and articles where I want the takeaway before deciding whether the rest is worth reading.

4. /senior

There are also times when ChatGPT explains far too much.

If you already know a subject, getting three paragraphs of background before the useful part can be maddening. /senior is my shorthand for skipping the 101 material.

Try this prompt: /senior Review this AI agent architecture. Assume I understand LLMs, tool calling, MCP and context windows: [paste details]

This one benefits from a little context because "senior" can mean different things depending on what you're discussing. Tell ChatGPT the expertise it should assume, and it can jump much closer to the level you need.

5. /diff

This is one of my favorites for editing. If I give ChatGPT 800 words and ask it to make three changes, I don't just want another 800 words back. I want to know what changed.

Try this prompt: /diff Tighten this paragraph without changing my argument: [paste text]

You can also be more explicit: /diff Show me only the sentences you would change and the replacements.

It's useful for writing, but the same idea works with code, prompts and other documents where comparing two nearly identical versions is more work than the edit itself.

6. /bullets

ChatGPT loves prose. Sometimes prose is exactly what I don't want.

Try this prompt: /bullets Give me the biggest reasons not to buy a new phone if mine is only two years old.

This is a tiny command, but it immediately tells the model what kind of answer will be easiest for me to scan.

I use it for meeting prep, pros and cons, shopping decisions, brainstorming and any situation where I'm looking for information rather than a beautifully constructed explanation.

7. /table

This command does the same thing for comparisons.

Try this prompt: /table Compare ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini for writing, research, coding and everyday use.

Instead of asking ChatGPT to "put this into a table with columns for..." every time, /table gives it the general idea.

You'll still want to specify the categories of course, but for quick comparisons this can turn a messy wall of text into something you can understand at a glance.

8. /devilsadvocate

This is the command I use when I think I've already made up my mind.

Try this prompt: /devilsadvocate I think cancelling all my streaming subscriptions and switching between one service each month will save me money. What's wrong with this plan?

Rather than asking ChatGPT whether it agrees, you're explicitly asking it to construct the strongest case against you.

That makes it useful for decisions where confirmation bias is the real problem. If the counterargument doesn't change your mind, you can at least make the decision knowing you've considered the other side.

9. /rubberduck

This one comes from the programming idea of rubber duck debugging: explaining a problem out loud can help you discover what's actually wrong.

You can make ChatGPT play the duck.

Try this prompt: /rubberduck Don't solve this for me yet. Ask me one question at a time to help me figure out why my morning routine keeps taking too long.

I like this because it changes ChatGPT from answer machine to thinking partner, which is always great to avoid brain rot from using AI too much.

Instead of immediately generating a 10-step solution based on incomplete information, you're telling it to interrogate the problem first. That can be useful for debugging code, working through a decision, planning a project or figuring out why something you're doing isn't working.

Try making your own slash commands

This is a useful trick that a lot of people don't know they can do. Because, maybe you like a few of mine, but want commands tailored to you.

You can create /short for answers under 100 words, /pitch for turning an idea into a specific format you use at work, /kids for explaining something to a child or /verify for forcing an answer to separate established facts from assumptions.

The slash itself isn't magic. It's just the easiest way to create a recognizable trigger. For commands where you want consistent behavior, define them in ChatGPT's instructions. You could add something like:

When I begin a prompt with /critic, skip praise and focus on weaknesses, factual vulnerabilities and missing information. When I use /human, rewrite the text with natural sentence variation and remove canned AI language and unnecessary transitions.

After that, /critic isn't merely something you hope ChatGPT interprets correctly. You've told it exactly what the shortcut means.

And that's why I've stuck with slash commands. One character and a word gets me there faster.

More from Tom's Guide

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• I made 7 Gemini Skills to handle my most repetitive prompts — #4 is my personal favorite

Update: Google responds to inquiries about this attack.

Sponsored Google ads for fake ChatGPT are leading Windows users to download malware in "ClickFix" traps, according to security researchers from the AI company Island.

The sponsored Google ads lead to Custom GPT sites that are built to look like normal ChatGPT websites. These ads pop up when people type terms like "chatgpt" into Google Search.

Unfortunately, for trapped users, the ads do go to legitimate chatgpt.com sites. However, in these instances, entering a prompt makes the fake service direct people to a "backup domain" due to "high traffic."

Clicking on that link then redirects unsuspecting users to another fake instance of ChatGPT with a fake Cloudflare verification page that contains ClickFix instructions. Island found nearly identical responses across two separate Custom GPTs over a 3-day period in August.

According to the researchers, the malware advertising campaign appeared to involve around 850 paid ads, 26 fake ChatGPT links, and 71 Google Ads campaign IDs over a three-month period from May 2026 through August 2026.

What is ClickFix?

ClickFix traps are built to trick people into installing or executing malicious commands on their devices. In this instance, the instructions from the backup domain trick Windows into running a command that downloads malware onto your computer.

Once installed, the malware infects the system. It can even survive PC restarts and uses a Telegram bot to send stolen info back to the hackers behind this camping The malware utilizes a tool called NetSupport RAT, which lets attackers remotely control an infected computer.

Island found that the domains rotated and other Windows malware-delivery forms were identified too suggesting that the attack is not based on a single website.

The company claims an AI tool highlighted the suspicious activity and human researchers confirmed it. However, it's not clear how many people may have been affected by this scam.

A Google spokesperson told Tom's Guide that it has already suspended accounts associated with this attack.

"Before this report was published, we suspended the advertiser accounts involved to block this scheme and updated our defenses to better detect these tactics," a spokesperson said.

We were told that Google is monitoring new attempts to utilize fake ads. Google does have a policy that does not allow misleading ads about a business, product, service or destination. Per Google, the company blocked more than 400 million misleading ads for violating Google's "Misrepresentation" policies last year.

How to avoid falling victim to online scams

The combination of malware and advertising — also known as malvertising — has a long, storied history, which means you should always be careful when clicking on any advertisement online. To stay safe, you could try using one of the best ad blockers, since Google's "sponsored" links are still technically ads; most blockers will hide them.

Beyond that, if you don't have or want an ad blocker, there are some red flags to note when using a search engine and especially if you get linked to a fake instance of ChatGPT.

As for ChatGPT, if you are an existing user or just trying it out, go to chatgpt.com; no need to search for it.

Likewise, I've covered ChatGPT outages quite frequently over the course of the last two years and even at its worst, the AI assistant never sends you to a "backup domain." Don't click that link. If ChatGPT is having issues, you can always check the OpenAI status page.

At the same time, no website verification or CAPTCHA will ever ask you to open Windows Run and paste a command. If a website asks you to press Win + R or run PowerShell, don't do it.

Finally, you should always have one of the best antivirus software solutions installed on your PC. From there, you want to ensure that your antivirus is current, updated and running on all your devices – both your computer and even your smartphone.

More from Tom's Guide

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If you blinked this month, you might think Meta and OpenAI launched essentially the same AI agent three weeks apart.

On September 8, Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent that gets its own dedicated cloud computer and keeps working on your tasks after you close the app. Twenty-one days later, OpenAI took the stage at DevDay 2026 in San Francisco and unveiled Dots — always-on AI agents inside ChatGPT, each running on its own cloud computer and browser.

And while they sound remarkably similar, with reports across the internet comparing them because of a few similarities like the fact that both get their own cloud computer, work after you leave, and can connect to outside services, that's about where the comparisons stop.

Muse and Dots are not interchangeable. These are different companies, different models and very different products. Most importantly for your wallet, they're aimed at different customers. Muse is free to start and was built for everyday people and small businesses. Dots starts with a $100-a-month Pro plan and is clearly aimed at professionals and developer teams.

Here's what you actually need to know about each one, where they overlap and which one matters to you right now.

Muse vs Dots at a glance

Meta Muse: A personal agent powered by Muse Spark and runs inside its own Muse Secure VM, giving it a dedicated cloud computer and browser where it can continue working after you leave. Muse is available in the U.S. and Canada with a free tier, alongside $20 and $100 monthly plans. You can use it on iOS, Android and the web, while Meta has expanded Muse with Mac app control, its own email address, AI glasses support and the Muse Charm companion device. Its Sentinel permissions system separates read and write access, and Muse can connect to services including Asana, Slack, Shopify, Stripe, Zoom, QuickBooks and Notion, as well as Facebook and Instagram business accounts.

ChatGPT Dots: Each dot is powered by GPT-6 Astra and gets its own dedicated cloud computer and browser, allowing it to continue working in the background after you leave ChatGPT. Dots are available to eligible ChatGPT Pro and Business Premium subscribers, with Enterprise, Edu and Healthcare access through an admin-enabled beta. You can interact with a dot through ChatGPT on the web, desktop and mobile, as well as Slack and Microsoft Teams, with voice calling available and texting in beta. Dots can connect to more than 4,000 apps through ChatGPT's plugin ecosystem and use custom rules, approval requirements and auto-review to govern what they're allowed to do. For now, users get one primary dot, although OpenAI has previewed specialist dots and a future where multiple dots can work together.

Both tools update you asynchronously and come back for approval before doing anything consequential. The idea that an autonomous agent shouldn't be able to send, spend or make sensitive changes without you is quickly becoming table stakes for this category.

What Meta Muse is

Muse is Meta's version for a personal AI agent, and the company made one huge bet that OpenAI hasn't: making it free to start.

The product is goal-first rather than chat-first. You give Muse something to accomplish — running parts of your business, finding new customers or handling logistics, for example — and it builds a plan, continues working after you close the app and returns when something changes or requires your approval.

Muse runs inside what Meta calls the Muse Secure VM, a dedicated cloud environment with its own browser that holds the agent and your data. You can set its name, avatar and communication style, watch its browser work and govern what it can touch through Sentinel, Meta's permissions system separating read access from write access.

Meta has gradually been expanding where Muse can operate. It now includes macOS app control, an email address of the agent's own and support for interacting with it through Meta's smart glasses. Meta has also announced integrations and commerce partnerships spanning services including Stripe, Shopify, Walmart, Expedia and Instacart.

Muse for Small Business pushes that further with third-party app connectors including Asana, Box, Canva, Dropbox, Figma, QuickBooks, Notion, Shopify, Slack, Stripe and Zoom, alongside access to Facebook and Instagram business accounts. These aren't a separate agent but additional capabilities inside Muse.

Muse has already faced scrutiny over what can happen when users grant an agent broad permissions. Recent reports about a Marketplace interaction involving Muse are a useful reminder that the convenience of an autonomous agent also depends heavily on exactly what you've authorized it to do.

What ChatGPT Dots are

Dots take the same basic always-on agent architecture in a very different direction.

CEO Sam Altman described them as "remarkably capable, always-on agents" during OpenAI's DevDay presentation and said the company's ambitions for Dots extend beyond ChatGPT itself.

Each dot runs on GPT-6 Astra, gets its own cloud computer and browser and can connect to more than 4,000 apps through ChatGPT's plugin ecosystem.

You give it a goal — monitoring a pipeline, managing a recurring workflow or researching something over several days — and the dot can continue pursuing it around the clock, sending updates and asking for your input when it reaches a boundary.

Dots can learn preferences over time and use read-only tools for some proactive background research. OpenAI also keeps particularly sensitive actions, including changing passwords, in human hands.

At launch, each person gets one primary dot they can name and customize with an avatar. OpenAI has also previewed "specialist dots" for companies and is working with Microsoft to bring the agents under Agent 365's management and security controls. The longer-term vision is effectively a team of specialized agents working alongside people.

Once set up, a dot can be reached through ChatGPT on mobile and web as well as services including Slack and Microsoft Teams. ChatGPT Space provides a shared environment where teammates and dots can work together on projects.

But there's a major catch: most ChatGPT users can't try one.

Dots are rolling out to ChatGPT Pro and Business Premium subscribers, while Enterprise, Edu and Healthcare workspaces get an admin-enabled beta. Free and Plus subscribers are locked out for now.

Pro 100, at $100 per month, is the entry point. OpenAI also offers Pro 200 and Pro 500 tiers, while Business Premium costs $125 per user each month. Pro subscribers in the EEA, Switzerland and UK also can't use Dots yet.

The biggest difference isn't the model — it's the customer

Put the technical similarities aside and the biggest distinction becomes obvious.

Muse starts at $0. Dots start at $100 a month. This alone tells you who Meta and OpenAI expect to use these products.

Meta is trying to put an autonomous agent in the hands of ordinary consumers and small businesses. OpenAI is starting with professionals, teams and organizations already willing to spend significantly more on AI.

That difference runs through almost every other decision the companies have made.

Muse is a standalone product built around the agent itself. It has a personality you shape, a Feed and Goals you can check, mobile apps, the palm-sized Muse Charm and integration with Meta's glasses. It feels like Meta is asking what happens when an AI agent becomes another personal device or service in your life.

OpenAI built Dots into ChatGPT. The agent is another capability of a platform professionals and businesses may already use, and OpenAI is putting it in places where work already happens, including Slack and Teams. ChatGPT Space and the planned specialist dots push the concept even further toward people and agents sharing the same workplace.

The underlying idea may be similar. The products built around it aren't.

Which should you use?

If you want to experiment with an AI agent today without adding another expensive subscription, Muse wins almost by default.

It's free to start, built around individual users and now has enough small-business integrations to make it useful beyond simple personal tasks. The trade-off is that giving an autonomous agent access to accounts, communications and other services requires paying close attention to its permissions, particularly given the early scrutiny around Muse.

If you're already paying for ChatGPT Pro or you're choosing an agent for a business, you've probably already found a use for Dots. OpenAI has made its professional and enterprise ambitions pretty clear.

For everyone else, there's little reason to pay $100 a month just to get Dots right now, particularly when OpenAI hasn't made them available to Plus subscribers. Muse wants to become your personal AI helper. Dots wants to become an always-on member of your team.

They may have arrived three weeks apart with remarkably similar technology underneath, but they're not really fighting for the same user — at least not yet.

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If you've ever asked Siri AI a follow-up question only to have it seemingly forget what you were talking about, the problem wasn't necessarily that Siri couldn't hear you.

It was that the assistant was built for a very different era of AI.

That's according to Nikola Mrkšić, CEO and co-founder of conversational AI company PolyAI, who previously worked on the technology behind Siri. I asked him why Apple's assistant has historically struggled with the kind of natural, back-and-forth conversation that now feels routine with ChatGPT and Gemini.

His answer comes down to a fundamental difference in how the technology works.

"The old Siri worked off enumerated intents: every path a conversation could take had to be mapped out in advance," Mrkšić tells Tom's Guide. "The moment you deviated from the script, the system got stuck."

That explains a lot about the Siri we've spent the past decade talking to.

Old Siri was essentially following a script

When Siri was built, developers couldn't simply give an AI model a conversation and let it figure out what the user wanted. Instead, engineers had to anticipate what people might ask and build flows capable of handling those requests.

Setting an alarm was one flow. Playing music was another. Sending a text was another. The problem appeared when humans, well, behaved like humans.

Change your mind halfway through a request, refer back to something you said earlier or phrase a question in an unexpected way and suddenly the carefully constructed path could fall apart.

"It looked like the assistant had forgotten what it was doing, but really it was just cornered," Mrkšić said.

One particularly difficult problem was disambiguation. If you asked Siri to contact someone whose name sounded similar to another person in your contacts, engineers had to build systems capable of working out which person you meant. I actually ran into this myself when my daughter was born. Because the spelling of her name is different than the typical spelling and I was asking Siri to share pictures of her with family and friends, I actually had to put her name into my contacts at birth.

Mrkšić described the process as building an "ontology of a conversation": mapping the different directions an interaction might go and trying to make common tasks hold up within that structure.

Rather than engineers trying to predict every possible conversational path, an LLM like ChatGPT or Gemini can consider the conversation itself as context and determine how to respond.

That's why talking to Gemini Live or ChatGPT Voice can feel fundamentally different from talking to the Siri many of us grew accustomed to.

Why Siri couldn't simply be upgraded into ChatGPT

That raises an obvious question: couldn't Apple have simply upgraded the Siri it already had? Not really, according to Mrkšić.

"Not into something like ChatGPT," he said.

Part of the problem was technological. Before modern LLMs, the ability to have genuinely free-flowing conversations simply wasn't there.

But Mrkšić argues there was another limitation: risk.

"Siri never set out to be a ChatGPT-style assistant," he said. "Apple's leadership has always run a low risk appetite, so any Siri response that could be misread as offensive or wrong got treated as a real risk."

The safer option was to tightly define what Siri could do.

Ask it to set an alarm, play a song or add something to your calendar and Apple could reasonably predict what would happen. Give an AI far more freedom to interpret what someone means and suddenly its behavior becomes much harder to control.

That tension hasn't disappeared just because the models have improved.

AI has largely solved Siri's short-term memory problem

One of the most frustrating things about traditional voice assistants is how easily they lose the thread of a conversation.

Mrkšić says remembering what someone said earlier in the same conversation is "largely solved at the model level." Current models can process enormous amounts of context, giving them far more room than necessary to keep track of an ordinary conversation.

So, if an assistant suddenly appears to forget what you said, the model itself may not always be the problem.

Companies still place rules and structures around models to control what they can do. According to Mrkšić, those constraints can sometimes create the impression that an assistant has lost the conversation when it has actually run into the boundaries placed around it.

There's also a much harder kind of memory to solve: knowing you. An assistant that remembers what you said five minutes ago is useful. An assistant that understands the people in your life, your routines, your emails and the things you're working on could be far more useful.

And that's where Apple faces an interesting trade-off.

Apple's biggest Siri advantage could also be its biggest challenge

Apple potentially has something ChatGPT and other standalone AI apps don't automatically have: deep access to the operating system. Your iPhone contains messages, emails, photos, contacts and other personal information that could provide an AI assistant with the context it needs to understand what you're actually asking.

"In theory, yes," Mrkšić said when I asked whether that gives Siri an advantage. "OS-level access to email, messages, photos, whatever's on your screen, is exactly the context that makes an AI assistant useful, more than any app-based chatbot can get without additional connectors."

The catch is privacy and trust. Apple has spent years positioning privacy as one of the iPhone's defining features. Giving an AI assistant enough personal context to become genuinely useful therefore requires Apple to walk a much narrower line than simply building a chatbot that knows more about you.

Mrkšić argues that Apple's privacy approach has historically limited the amount of user data available to its systems compared with some competitors.

"Voice agents become more useful the more they know about you," he said.

That may ultimately be the real test for Siri: not whether Apple can build an intelligent model, but how much personal context it is willing to let that model use.

Even the way you say something matters

There's another reason talking is harder than typing: humans are messy speakers. We pause. We interrupt ourselves. We change our minds in the middle of sentences.

Imagine saying, "Make the appointment for 2 ... 3 PM."

A human listener can hear the pause and change in your voice and understand that you corrected yourself. A system that converts your speech into text before reasoning over it may only have the transcript to work with.

That can strip away information carried in your tone, timing and delivery. Newer audio-native AI models are designed to reason over audio directly rather than relying entirely on a transcript. Mrkšić points to PolyAI's own Dialog-RSN-1 as an example of that approach.

For an assistant like Siri, understanding those cues could eventually make conversations feel much less like issuing commands to a computer and much more like simply talking.

What Siri still needs to get right

The surprising part of Mrkšić's assessment is that the underlying AI may no longer be the hardest part.

The technology already exists for voice agents to hold long, natural conversations. PolyAI, for example, deploys conversational agents for businesses in industries including banking, hospitality and healthcare.

The bigger question for Apple is what it is willing to let Siri do.

"What's missing is Apple's willingness to loosen its constraints somewhat so that Siri can truly help you get things done," Mrkšić said.

The next generation of voice assistants won't be defined simply by whether they can answer a follow-up question or remember what you said three sentences ago. ChatGPT, Gemini and other modern AI systems have already changed expectations around that. The bigger leap comes when an assistant understands enough about you and has enough access to actually act on what you're saying.

Apple has an enormous advantage because Siri already lives on the devices where much of our digital lives happen. But taking advantage of that position means solving a problem that's as much about trust and product philosophy as it is about AI.

The technology that made the old Siri feel like it was constantly forgetting you is disappearing. Now Apple has to decide how much it wants the new Siri to remember.

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OpenAI's Dots essentially give ChatGPT a job rather than another prompt. Each Dot gets its own computer and browser in the cloud, can connect to the apps you already use and can keep working toward your goals even when you're no longer sitting in front of ChatGPT.

As someone who spends a lot of time testing AI agents, I immediately wanted to see what one could actually do.

There's just one problem: I can't use Dots on my ChatGPT Plus account. And neither can most ChatGPT users.

OpenAI is initially rolling out Dots to ChatGPT Pro and Business Premium users in eligible markets. Enterprise users, including those on Edu and Healthcare plans, can also try the beta if their workspace administrator enables it.

OpenAI says it plans to expand Dots to more users "soon," but there's no date for when Plus, Go or Free users might get access.

At first, keeping one of DevDay's biggest announcements away from most ChatGPT users seems like an odd decision. But the more you look at what Dots are capable of — and particularly the safeguards OpenAI has built around them — the more the cautious rollout starts to make sense.

Dots aren't just another version of ChatGPT

The important difference between Dots and the ChatGPT most of us use today isn't how smart the AI is. It's what happens when you stop talking to it. ChatGPT generally waits for you to tell it what to do next. A Dot is designed to keep going.

Powered by GPT-6 Astra, Dots can work on several projects at once, learn from your feedback and continue working toward your goals 24/7. OpenAI says they can connect to more than 4,000 apps through its plugin ecosystem, and you can reach your Dot through ChatGPT, Slack or Teams.

More importantly, a Dot can look for useful work even when you haven't explicitly given it another prompt.

OpenAI calls this "proactive research." One early tester's Dot, for example, noticed that he'd forgotten to invoice a publication, prepared the invoice and sent it after receiving his approval.

Instead of opening ChatGPT because you need something, OpenAI wants Dots to notice that something needs doing and bring it to you. It's also where things get considerably more complicated.

Giving AI more freedom creates a bigger problem

If ChatGPT misunderstands a prompt, you might get a bad answer. If an AI agent misunderstands what you wanted while it has access to your apps, browser and potentially your computer, the stakes are higher.

OpenAI appears well aware of that, because Dots come with a surprisingly extensive set of restrictions around what they can do without you.

When a Dot is performing proactive research in the background, for example, its connected-app tools are restricted to read-only access. That means it can't independently send messages, modify content inside an app or control your browser or computer while looking for something useful to do.

You also choose which apps a Dot can access, while Custom Rules can determine which actions it can take independently, which require your approval and which are blocked.

Then there's auto-review. Actions that could affect your accounts or share information are checked against your instructions and OpenAI's safety requirements before they're allowed to proceed. Some particularly sensitive jobs, such as changing a password, always stay with you.

As you can immediately see, these aren't the kinds of guardrails you need when you're asking ChatGPT to write an email or plan dinner. They are what you need when an AI can actually do things.

OpenAI's own testing shows how difficult that can get

OpenAI's safety testing also gives us a clue as to why Dots may be getting a more limited rollout. One of the challenges with an always-on agent is keeping track of exactly what you've authorized it to do as it moves between tasks.

Giving an AI permission to take an action in one situation doesn't necessarily mean you want it taking the same action later. And the more jobs an agent is juggling, the more complicated those boundaries become.

That's particularly important with GPT-6 Astra, the model powering Dots. OpenAI's broader Astra testing found that the model was considerably better at staying within its authorized scope than previous models, but it wasn't perfect. In simulated work environments using the confirmation policy that users receive by default, Astra still produced a 3% overall rate of outcomes OpenAI classified as misaligned. That was nevertheless substantially lower than the 8% recorded by GPT-5.6 Sol under the same conditions.

That doesn't mean your Dot has a 3% chance of going rogue every time you give it something to do. These are deliberately difficult evaluations designed to expose potential problems, not a prediction of how often something will go wrong in everyday use. But they demonstrate the problem OpenAI is trying to solve.

Building an AI capable of doing more on its own is one thing. Making sure it consistently understands where its authority ends is another.

Dots may also be expensive to run

There's another potential reason OpenAI isn't immediately handing Dots to every ChatGPT user: all that work requires computing power. OpenAI hasn't said cost is why Dots aren't available on Plus, Go or Free, so we can't know for sure whether that was part of the decision.

But the way Dots are being packaged is interesting. Pro and Business Premium subscribers get their first Dot as part of their existing plan, and OpenAI says conversations with it won't count toward normal ChatGPT usage limits. The plan also comes with an allowance for what OpenAI calls "deeper work."

Eventually, OpenAI says users will be able to add more Dots and increase either how quickly a Dot works or the total amount of work it can perform each month.

That's a pretty strong indication that there's a meaningful cost attached to having an AI agent working for you around the clock, even if OpenAI isn't saying that's why access is limited today.

And it raises an interesting question about what Dots might eventually look like on cheaper ChatGPT plans.

A future Plus version could conceivably come with tighter limits on background work, fewer resources or additional charges once you hit a certain amount of usage. For now, though, OpenAI hasn't announced how access will work beyond saying more users are coming "soon."

What can you use instead of Dots?

The good news is that you don't necessarily have to wait for Dots to start handing some of your work over to ChatGPT.

The closest option is ChatGPT Work. While it isn't an always-on personal assistant in quite the same way as a Dot, Work can take a larger job and carry it through multiple steps for you, including researching information, working across files and apps and navigating web-based tasks.

That's useful when you want to hand ChatGPT a job rather than sit there prompting it through every individual step.

Scheduled tasks cover another piece of the Dots experience. You can have ChatGPT run something later or on a recurring schedule, which works well for things like regular briefings, reminders or checking something periodically.

Neither gives you the full experience OpenAI is promising with Dots, but it's a start.

Meta's Muse is another option if the always-on assistant part is what interests you most. Muse takes a similarly agentic approach and offers a useful glimpse at where this category of AI assistant is heading.

There just isn't a true one-for-one replacement for Dots yet.

Bottom line: I'm waiting for Dots to come to Plus

For now, OpenAI hasn't given us a date for when that will happen. The company says only that it is beginning with Pro, Business Premium and Enterprise and plans to expand Dots to more users soon.

Still, the limited rollout may be one of the most interesting things about Dots. Typically, most major ChatGPT upgrades have been about giving us a smarter model, a new tool or another way to ask AI for something. But Dots changes that completely. Now, OpenAI is building an AI that can continue working when you're gone, notice things you haven't asked about yet and potentially take action on your behalf.

So, while I'd like a Dot on my Plus account right now, I can understand why OpenAI isn't handing one to everyone on day one. The real test will come when it does.

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For many ChatGPT users, the AI is mostly a tool to answer questions in a chat window. You type a prompt, wait for an answer and then take that answer somewhere else yourself. OpenAI is trying to change that with Dots.

Announced today, Dots are persistent AI agents that get their own virtual computer in the cloud, allowing them to browse the web, use connected apps and continue working even when you're no longer sitting in front of ChatGPT.

Instead of asking ChatGPT to help you accomplish something and then doing the rest yourself, the idea is that you can hand a Dot the job.

That could mean comparing how much dinner would cost from several restaurants, keeping tabs on something you're researching or catching an administrative task you've forgotten about. And because the Dot keeps running in the background, you don't necessarily need to keep ChatGPT open while it works.

It's a significant change in how OpenAI wants us to use ChatGPT. Rather than simply making the chatbot smarter, Dots are designed to give it something it has largely been missing: a place to actually do things for you.

ChatGPT gets its own computer

The easiest way to understand a Dot is to imagine giving ChatGPT its own computer.

Each Dot operates inside an isolated virtual machine running in the cloud rather than taking over your laptop or filling your browser with tabs. From there, it can browse websites, open applications and carry out tasks using the services you've connected to it.

You can explicitly give a Dot permission to assist with something on your local machine, but otherwise the two remain separate.

Dots can also connect to more than 4,000 apps through plugins, giving the agent a way to work with services you already use rather than keeping everything contained inside ChatGPT.

And you don't have to constantly return to the ChatGPT website to communicate with it.

OpenAI says you'll be able to reach a Dot through voice calls and services including Slack and Microsoft Teams. SMS support is also planned, meaning you could eventually text your AI assistant much like you'd text another person.

That starts to make the "persistent" part of Dots considerably more interesting. ChatGPT doesn't just exist in the tab where you started the conversation anymore.

What would you actually use a Dot for?

The best examples aren't complicated autonomous coding jobs or elaborate demonstrations of AI agents. They're the annoying everyday tasks that currently require you to bounce between several websites or apps.

Take ordering dinner. You could ask a Dot to look at several options for dinner, and instead of simply recommending restaurants, it could browse delivery services and build itemized cart estimates for them. It can factor in things such as estimated local taxes and a tip allowance and then send you the comparisons so you can decide which one you actually want to order.

That's a fundamentally different interaction from asking ChatGPT, "Where should I order dinner tonight?"

The same applies to work. Give a Dot an interview recording or video transcript and it could help produce social captions and show notes, identify potential clips and work with assets across connected platforms.

Or it might notice an administrative job you've forgotten about, such as an invoice you still need to send, prepare it and put it in front of you for approval. Once you start, you'll discover the difference is how much of the process happens after you've made the initial request.

Until now, even when ChatGPT gave me exactly what I wanted, I was usually the one copying the answer, opening another app and doing something with it. Dots are an attempt to remove more of those steps.

You can talk to your Dot almost anywhere

One of the more interesting parts of the launch is that OpenAI doesn't expect you to spend all day watching your Dot work. You'll initially need to create one using ChatGPT on the desktop web or desktop app, where you can choose its purpose and connect the services it needs.

After that, the relationship becomes less tied to the ChatGPT interface. You can message your Dot from mobile and, depending on the service, communicate with it through other platforms. Voice calls provide another way to check in or give it something new to do, while upcoming SMS support could make interacting with one feel even less like using a conventional chatbot.

We've already seen AI companies add intelligent agents to chatbots, but most still expect you to go to the AI. Dots begin flipping that relationship around by allowing the AI to exist in more of the places where you're already communicating.

How much do Dots cost?

Dots are rolling out today to ChatGPT Pro and Business Premium subscribers in eligible markets. OpenAI is also making them available through Enterprise betas where administrators choose to enable the feature.

For Pro subscribers, the first Dot is included with the subscription at no additional charge, and OpenAI says users will receive extended usage limits during the first month.

You'll need to create and initially configure a Dot through ChatGPT on desktop, including connecting any apps you want it to use. Once that's done, you'll be able to communicate with it from mobile as well.

That makes Dots one of the more substantial additions OpenAI has made to its paid ChatGPT experience, particularly for Pro users who already have access to its most capable models and agent features.

ChatGPT is starting to leave the chat window

I'll need more time actually using Dots before deciding whether having an always-on AI assistant is enough to justify the cost of ChatGPT Pro on its own. But I'm more interested in what Dots say about where ChatGPT is going.

For the past few years, the basic relationship hasn't changed all that much even as the models behind ChatGPT have become dramatically more capable. I open ChatGPT, ask it for something and wait for it to respond.

Dots start breaking that pattern. If they work as OpenAI intends, I could give ChatGPT something to do in the morning, close the tab and spend the next few hours doing something completely unrelated while its virtual computer keeps working.

Then I could text or call it, see what it found and decide whether I want it to take the next step.

The takeaway: exciting or scary

If you're like me and think giving ChatGPT its own computer sounds a little terrifying, there are certainly pretty obvious questions about what happens when the AI gets something wrong. OpenAI has built several restrictions into Dots that are particularly important when the agent is operating in the background.

For starters, your Dot's cloud computer is isolated from your personal computer by default. Your local files aren't suddenly sitting inside the virtual machine just because you've created a Dot.

There's also a separation between the AI model and your credentials. Dots can sign into supported services using saved credentials without exposing the password itself to the underlying model.

More importantly, OpenAI isn't giving Dots unlimited permission to quietly act on your behalf. For example, during proactive background research, Dots operate in read-only mode. That means an agent can gather information while you're away, but it can't independently send a message, delete a file or spend your money.

Actions like those require you to come back into the loop and approve them. That's important, because an AI capable of researching dinner prices overnight is very different from one capable of ordering $200 worth of sushi because it misunderstood what you wanted.

It doesn't eliminate the privacy and security questions surrounding persistent agents, particularly as people connect more accounts to them, but it puts some boundaries around what "always on" actually means.

Will you try Dots? Let me know your initial reactions in the comments.

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I can’t remember listening to my first podcast or even when the term itself became mainstream. But what I do know is that I’ve been addicted to podcasts and can’t imagine my mornings and afternoon work breaks without them.

Turns out there’s a holiday that’s all about rejoicing over the podcast medium itself and the wealth of independent creators that millions of people listen to for their perspective on a myriad of topics. As for myself, I tend to hunker down and listen intently as my favorite podcasters shower praise and vehemently lambast the many happenings within the realms of gaming, pro wrestling, current events, music, etc.

With International Podcast Day now in our midst, I wanted to celebrate such an occasion by giving my attention to a host of podcasts I may have never even heard of. With that goal in mind, I presented my favorite podcasts to four chatbots and tasked them with finding me comparable selections that match my listening needs.

ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Muse laid out a strong selection of podcasts that surprised me, due to how much they fulfill my tastes as a listener. Here’s how this successful AI recommendation experiment led me to my latest listens.

AI finds my favorites

To get a good idea of the podcasts I regularly listen to, I presented this request to all four chatbots:

“My favorite podcasts are the Weapon Wheel Podcast, The Brilliant Idiots, Joe Budden Podcast, Solomonster Sounds Off, The Midnight Boys, Double Tap - The Fighting Games Community Podcast and We Might Be Drunk Podcast. Based on each of those picks, recommend another podcast I might like.”

ChatGPT did a great job of fulfilling my needs to find a gaming podcast that features a panel of passionate gamers who aren’t afraid to let a few colorful words flow as they get into heated debates. It also found a podcast that features two best friends diving into the most trending topics and adding their hilarious two cents on every one of them.

Here are the two recommendations it gave me that ended up on my list of must-listens:

• Your pick: Weapon Wheel Podcast. Try this next: SpawnCast. Why I think it fits: Both are built around passionate gaming discussion, news, industry happenings and personalities rather than just straightforward game reviews. SpawnCast also shows up among the podcasts listeners of Weapon Wheel tend to subscribe to.
• Your pick: The Brilliant Idiots. Try this next: Bad Friends. Why I think it fits: This is probably the easiest recommendation on the entire list. If you like Charlamagne and Andrew Schulz bouncing between serious conversations, ridiculous tangents and offensive jokes, Bobby Lee and Andrew Santino should work extremely well for you. Podchaser also lists Bad Friends among shows similar to The Brilliant Idiots.

When it came time for Gemini to expand my choices of podcasts to listen to, it listed three picks that piqued my interest based on their AI-generated descriptions. One of them was another gaming-themed podcast that matched my love for uncut discussions, the second one gave me another podcast all about pop-culture deep dives and the final recommendation catered to my love for comedians having hilarious conversations about anything that comes to mind:

• For Weapon Wheel Podcast - Recommended: Castle Super Beast. Why it fits: Weapon Wheel is known for raw, unfiltered, long-form gaming industry talk with a distinct culture and zero corporate spin. Castle Super Beast (hosted by Woolie Versus and Pat Stares Back) brings that same candid, high-energy gaming banter, combining deep technical industry takes with hilarious, off-the-cuff humor.
• For The Midnight Boys - Recommended: The Big Picture. Why it fits: Hosted by Van Lathan and the Ringer squad, The Midnight Boys brings high-energy fandom, banter, and nerd culture debates. Staying within The Ringer network, The Big Picture (hosted by Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins) offers top-tier pop culture, movie drafts, and deep-dive media discussions delivered with sharp chemistry.
• For We Might Be Drunk Podcast - Recommended: Tuesdays with Stories. Why it fits: We Might Be Drunk thrives on relaxed, hangout-style comic talk over drinks. Tuesdays with Stories, hosted by Mark Normand alongside Joe List, delivers that same loose, effortlessly funny stand-up comedian banter filled with touring stories, life observations, and unscripted comedy.

Claude’s suggestions highlighted a bunch of podcasts I already listen to. But there was one pick on its list that stood out as another quality production that resonated with my love for comedy and the comedians who uphold the off-the-cuff hilarity that comes with it in a podcast setting:

• We Might Be Drunk → Two Bears, One Cave. Comedians trading stories and roasting each other, with a similar loose feel.

For my final pick, I gave Meta’s newly released Muse chatbot a shot at pushing me in the right direction toward a potential new favorite podcast. And this time, it ended up dropping another podcast in my lap that centered around my adoration for smart commentary about sci-fi, fantasy, and nerd culture:

• The Midnight Boys → The House of R. Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson go just as deep on Marvel, Star Wars, and fantasy nerd stuff.

I have to shout out ChatGPT’s overall observation of my tastes in podcasts, which described me perfectly:

And there's an interesting pattern here: you seem to prefer podcasts where the hosts' personalities are almost as important as the subject matter. That's why I'd steer you toward shows with a strong chemistry between recurring hosts rather than highly produced, documentary-style podcasts.

The takeaway

Even though ChatGPT has earned a spot on my AI tool list as one of the best chatbots for recommendations, Gemini, Claude and Muse also excelled at gifting me a lineup of podcasts that match the quality selections OpenAI’s AI assistant sent my way.

After listening to a few episodes from each of those chatbots’ podcast proposals, I ended up with a YouTube and Apple Podcasts playlist full of podcast material that will stave off those dreaded moments of boredom in the near future. I implore everyone reading this to present my prompt to their preferred chatbot, fill in the blanks with your top picks and see just how good AI is at selecting podcasts you just may fall in love with.

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• I used ChatGPT and Gemini to build my Oktoberfest bucket list — these are the 5 celebrations that made the cut
• ChatGPT is now my go-to for recommendations — 7 prompts I use to find new movies, music, games and more
• I asked ChatGPT and Gemini to build a movie marathon based on one oddly specific theme — here are the 7 recommended films I loved the most

There are plenty of supposed ChatGPT “tricks” floating around online, and I tend to approach most of them with a healthy dose of skepticism. If you've used ChatGPT for any length of time, you know that it’s getting better at sounding less robotic, but it still struggles with the overuse of words and phrases like, “that distinction matters,” “increasingly” and the overuse of patterns like “if x than y.”

But for those who spend a lot of time writing emails or corporate notes and use ChatGPT has a faster way to get the job done, than you might be interested in this viral trick. By simply adding /human before your prompt, you can get ChatGPT to ditch its telltale AI writing habits and respond more like a real person might.

To understand the reasoning behind this trick, it’s important to know how large language models respond to context. A single instruction like /human can sometimes steer an answer in a way that you’d expect and less like AI.

To test this trick, I gave ChatGPT five everyday writing tasks, from drafting an awkward email to writing a LinkedIn post that's practically begging for AI clichés. Here’s what happened.

1. The awkward work email

Prompt: Write an email telling my boss I won't finish a project by Friday and need until Monday. I don't want to make excuses, but I also don't want to sound careless.

After running the identical prompt with /human, the biggest difference is that it removed what sounds like a carefully engineered “professional email” and more like a person giving their boss an early, straightforward heads-up. It actually sounded like something a real human might send.

2. The birthday text

Prompt: Write a birthday text for my best friend of 20 years. Make it warm and funny without getting overly sentimental.

You’ll notice the /human version changed mostly the cadence and specificity, not the message itself. It made the message messy in a deliberate way. And, it uses more conversational rhythm: short sentence > joke > longer thought > joke > affection > done. It’s not overly polished in the way ChatGPT usually responds. There are also far less generic sentiments.

3. The recommendation

Prompt: Recommend a coffee maker for someone who drinks two cups every morning, hates complicated appliances and has a budget of $150. Explain your recommendation in about 150 words.

Adding /human made the text sound more like a person answering the question from experience. The original sounds like a product recommendation from the actual company, which makes it sound less sincere. The human version also made fewer transitions. It removed obvious AI phrases like, “more importantly” and “for your needs,” which are typical AI fluff.

4. The personal story

Prompt: Write 150 words about the moment you realize your oldest child is growing up faster than you expected. Make it emotional without being overly sentimental.

The /human version feels less polished and more conversational, replacing carefully constructed imagery and symmetrical phrasing with messier, more specific observations. It also avoids neatly explaining the emotion, letting humor, uncertainty and slightly imperfect phrasing make the moment feel more natural. It shows rather than tells, which is what human writing often does.

5. The LinkedIn post

Prompt: Write a LinkedIn post announcing that I'm starting a new job. I'm excited about the opportunity, but I don't want it to sound like every other LinkedIn announcement.

The /human version drops the LinkedIn cliches and replaces them with more specific, slightly messy thoughts like nerves, self-doubt and worrying about a first-day outfit. The sentence structure is also looser and more conversational, so it reads more like someone sharing news than crafting a professional announcement. This test definitely felt like the final boss of AI writing.

Final thoughts

It’s clear that this viral trick definitely works, even with the latest version of ChatGPT, which already claims to cut the fluff. But even by adding /human to the prompt, AI writing is still AI writing. No matter how much you try to adjust a draft written by AI, it’s always better to start with a human draft and then ask AI to help you edit. Once you start with an AI draft, it’s very hard to compose it into something that doesn’t sound completely robotic.

Give this trick a try and let me know what you think in the comments. Have you tried another viral hack? Share your thoughts and start the conversation.

More from Tom's Guide

• I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Muse to predict how bad the Nor'easter is going to be this weekend — here's what they say
• ChatGPT-6 or Claude Opus 5.5? Here’s which AI I'd use for writing, planning and 5 other everyday tasks
• I tested ChatGPT-6 vs Claude Opus 5.5 with 5 everyday prompts — it wasn’t even close

It’s always interesting to take note of behaviors that cause the people I know to remain in a positive state of mind and the ones that tamper with their well-being.

Clearly, staying out all night before a workday, ordering Uber Eats every night and constantly getting fooled by AI videos that are clearly meant to infuriate have taken a toll on some of the people I know. But there are a few friends and family members I’ve come across lately that seem to be in good spirits, thanks to daily workouts, analog activities and conversations with equally positive people.

I’m usually in a good mood thanks to the habits I’ve built up over the years, but I know there’s always room for improvement. That goal pushed me to ask ChatGPT for a list of the best prompts that push it to help anyone develop the sort of tendencies that will steadily improve their lives.

ChatGPT recognized my intention of converting it into my personal habit coach, generated some super useful prompts and helped me attach three new handy habits to my lifestyle pattern in the process.

The 7 prompts that can turn ChatGPT into your digital practical habit coach

After simply asking ChatGPT, “Give me 7 of the best ChatGPT prompts anyone can use to help them build healthier habits,” it got right to work coming up with the following collection of commands that help it deliver positive habit-building practices:

• The Habit Audit: Act as my habit coach. I want to build a healthier lifestyle without completely changing my routine. Ask me 10 questions about my sleep, diet, exercise, stress, screen time and daily schedule. Based on my answers, identify the 3 habits that would likely give me the biggest improvement with the least effort. For each one, give me a simple way to start today and a realistic way to maintain it.
• The Tiny Habits Prompt: Help me build healthier habits using the smallest possible steps. Choose 5 areas of my life that could benefit from a healthier habit and give me a version of each habit that takes less than 2 minutes to complete. Then show me how I can gradually increase each habit over 30 days without making the changes feel overwhelming.
• The Habit Stacking Prompt: Ask me about the things I already do every day, such as waking up, brushing my teeth, making coffee, eating meals and going to bed. Then find opportunities to attach one healthy habit to each existing routine. Give me 7 habit-stacking ideas, explain why each pairing makes sense, and rank them from easiest to hardest.
• The Bad-Habit Replacement Prompt: Help me replace my unhealthy habits rather than simply telling me to stop them. Ask me about 5 habits I want to change and what usually triggers them. For each habit, identify the underlying need I'm trying to satisfy and suggest 3 healthier replacements that provide a similar reward. Make the replacements realistic enough that I could actually use them in everyday life.
• The 30-Day Habit Challenge: Create a 30-day challenge designed to help me become healthier without requiring a gym membership, expensive products or a complete lifestyle overhaul. Give me one small task per day involving movement, nutrition, sleep, hydration, stress management or reducing sedentary time. Make the tasks gradually more challenging, but keep every individual task realistic for a busy person.
• The Habit Failure Investigator: I keep trying to build healthy habits but eventually fall off track. Act like a habit detective. Ask me questions about when I usually fail, what triggers it, what my environment looks like, how much time I have and what I expect from myself. Then identify the most likely reasons I'm failing and redesign my habits around those obstacles. Don't tell me to simply “have more discipline.”
• The Personal Health Routine: Help me design a simple daily routine that supports better health without taking over my life. First ask me about my schedule, current habits, sleep, meals, activity level, stress and the health goals I care about. Then create a morning, daytime and evening routine with no more than 3 habits in each section. Prioritize habits that are inexpensive, sustainable and easy to measure. Include a backup version for days when I have almost no time or motivation.

Using the first prompt to adopt three new daily rituals that will benefit me the most

Since I was open to participating in a ChatGPT-led Q&A, I put the first prompt into action.

The 10 questions the chatbot shot back at me covered the following topics in relation to my daily habits: sleep, sleep quality, breakfast, typical diet, exercise, daily movement, stress, screen time, schedule and the easy-win question. I answered them as honestly as I could (and was a little bit embarrassed about a few of them, to be quite honest).

Scarfing down some chocolate Teddy Grahams & orange juice in the morning (the breakfast of champions, if you ask me!), sitting for hours while I type for hours on end during the work week and getting stressed out whenever writer’s block hits me like a brick stood out as some of my worst tendencies. ChatGPT wasn’t too harsh in its overall response—it noted that I already have a solid foundation due to my respectable sleep schedule, my daily water consumption, my regular walks, moving around during my breaks and doing exercises I actually enjoy.

While it didn’t suggest I perform a lifestyle overhaul, it offered up these three major habits that could bring even more prosperity to my physical and mental health:

• Turn your existing exercise into a simple strength routine: This directly addresses the one area you identified yourself, while building on exercises you already enjoy. You don't need to suddenly become a 5-day-a-week gym person. Do a 20-minute strength session 2 days a week. Keep it extremely simple. Pick two recurring days—say Tuesday and Saturday—and treat those as your "gym days." If you miss one, don't compensate by doubling up. Just resume at the next opportunity.
• Upgrade your breakfast without making breakfast a project: Your current breakfast is essentially a quick hit of refined carbohydrates and sugar. Since you also wake up somewhat tired, breakfast is an easy place to make a small nutritional improvement without changing the rest of your diet. Keep the Teddy Grahams and orange juice if you enjoy them, but add one protein-rich food. A protein shake or Greek yogurt counts.
• Create an afternoon screen-time boundary: This is probably the easiest place to reclaim some time without sacrificing the hobbies that help you decompress. You specifically said your screen use peaks in the afternoon, while your evenings contain activities you genuinely enjoy. I wouldn't tell you to "stop watching TV" or "use your phone less." Instead, create one screen-free block during the afternoon. This could also be useful when you're struggling to come up with article ideas: instead of immediately reaching for another screen, take a walk or listen to music and let your brain disengage.

The takeaway

Reading through ChatGPT’s selection of better habits that I should execute inspired me to do just that.

Locking in to do three sets of 10 push-ups, squats and sit-ups alongside five minutes of stretching before leaving the house gets the blood flowing even more once the sun rises. Eating some pistachios or cashews and drinking a protein shake became a part of my new go-to morning ritual. And taking the time to get into brainstorming mode just by walking around my neighborhood or outside my workplace without my phone in hand led to more lightbulb moments of creativity.

ChatGPT’s positive habit-building tips worked a lot better than I expected.

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Meta has a new AI model, and I wanted to know how it handles the kinds of prompts people actually use, especially in comparison to ChatGPT-6.

Meta Muse is the company’s latest model, arriving at a time when ChatGPT has become the default chatbot for millions of people. But benchmarks only tell us so much. What matters more to me is whether an AI can write the awkward text you’ve been avoiding, plan a realistic day out with your family or explain something complicated without making it even more confusing.

So I put Meta Muse and ChatGPT through five everyday prompts covering writing, planning, problem-solving, explaining and creative reasoning. I wanted to know which one best understood what I was actually asking for and which could give me the best answer to use

After five rounds, there was a clear winner — but the results were much closer than I expected.

1. Handling an awkward situation

Prompt: My neighbor keeps putting their trash cans partly in front of my driveway, and it's making it difficult to back out. Write a text asking them to stop. I want to be friendly because we get along, but clear enough that they actually change what they're doing. Don't make it sound passive-aggressive.

ChatGPT led directly with the request, cutting to the chase and delivered a note that eliminated ambiguity around how far over they need to go.

Meta delivered a courteous and natural note. The ask feels neighborly and the phrasing suggests a minor
physical adjustment rather than something more serious.

Winner: Meta wins for a draft that hits the prompt’s tone constraints better for an ongoing, friendly relationship. ChatGPT’s message of “completely clear” reads like an HOA notice and slightly passive-aggressive.

2.  Planning under constraints

Prompt: Plan a Saturday in New York City for a family with three kids ages 5, 9 and 12. We have a budget of $200 for activities and food, want to avoid spending the whole day walking, and need at least one indoor activity in case it rains. Give me a realistic schedule from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

ChatGPT did a nice job with geographic clustering, to ensure the walking distance was short for the first part of the day. The zero-cost options and pacing of the day with high energy and sit-down segments were also helpful.

Meta picked an attraction with far higher entertainment value for the targeted age spread (5, 9, and 12). The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) easily captivates all three ages simultaneously. Meta also demonstrated accurate NYC transit knowledge by explicitly citing the MTA’s 44-inch height cutoff for free child rides, included a practical playground stop right across the street, and gave concrete logistical guidance (e.g., sitting on the right side of the ferry outbound).

Winner: ChatGPT wins. While Meta's AMNH plan is more fun on paper, its entire budget math hinges on an unstated assumption of tri-state residency. ChatGPT wins on strict adherence to the prompt's financial and logistical constraints.

3. Advice / problem-solving

Prompt: I have 45 minutes before guests arrive. My kitchen is messy, the living room needs vacuuming, there's laundry on the couch and I still need to shower. Give me the most efficient plan to get everything done. Tell me what I should skip if I run out of time.

ChatGPT anticipated a critical blind spot the prompt forgot to mention: the guest bathroom. Adding a 5-minute block to check toilet paper and wipe the sink is the difference between a good plan and a realistic one. It also provided highly specific guardrails for the shower block, which prevents the most common reason people run late in this scenario.

Meta delivered behavioral advice, which was excellent, and explicitly stated the rationale for the timeline and ending with the mandate to use a timer. It’s timing format was also easier to read than ChatGPT’s.

Winner: ChatGPT wins for operational realism and anticipating unstated needs. While Meta's timer advice is sharp, its kitchen expectations are a setup for failure. ChatGPT recognized that when you have 45 minutes, you are mostly straightening and organizing, not necessarily cleaning it in such a short amount of time.

4.  Explain something complicated simply

Prompt: Explain why airplanes can stay in the air to a curious 10-year-old. Don't use equations or assume they know what lift, drag or air pressure mean. Keep it under 200 words and use an analogy they could picture.

ChatGPT introduced an accurate, intuitive physical mechanism: wings push air down, which pushes the plane up (Newton’s third law translated into plain English).

Meta offered perfect audience calibration. The tone is lively and speaks directly to a 10-year-old ("with a grown-up driving, of course!", "whoosh"). It picked one analogy—the hand out the car window—and committed to it entirely, tying it back to paper airplanes and the runway to explain why forward speed matters.

Winner: Meta wins. It kept the energy high, matched a 10-year-old's reading level without talking down to them and delivered a clear, memorable takeaway.

5. Creative reasoning

Prompt: Invent a new app that solves a small but annoying everyday problem people have at home. It can't be a to-do list, meal planner, budgeting app or smart-home remote. Give it a name, explain the problem it solves, describe how it works and tell me why someone would actually keep using it after the first week.

ChatGPT solved a universal human frustration without requiring whole-house cataloging. The interaction model involves snapping a photo and speaking natural language ("Christmas lights in the blue bin") is low-effort.

Meta identified a hyper-specific, universally relatable domestic failure point and gave the app a brilliant, punchy name (Takeout). Its retention logic is rock-solid: instead of pretending users love opening chore apps, it acknowledged that the best utility apps require zero maintenance and rely on loss aversion.

Winner: Meta wins because the chatbot built a product around the reality of household laziness and recognized that an app survives past week one only when it demands almost no manual input from the user.

Final thoughts

After five prompts, Meta Muse takes the win 3-2. To say I'm both shocked and impressed is a serious understatement. While ChatGPT was stronger when a prompt required careful planning and attention to practical constraints, Meta Muse stood out when the task depended more on understanding people. Its neighbor text sounded like something I'd actually send, its airplane explanation was perfectly pitched for a 10-year-old and its app idea showed a surprisingly good understanding of why people abandon apps that require too much effort.

Meta Muse feels very much like it's own model, not one that's trying to imitate or catch up to ChatGPT. The little "Muse" at the top is unnecessary, but adorable.

ChatGPT is still my go-to, but this test proves that Meta has come a long way and this latest model offers a pretty strong first impression.

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Mother Nature’s undefeated streak in disrupting my weekend plans is highly impressive.

Just when I thought I’d be enjoying a nice two-day journey across New York with my equally adventurous friends, I learned of a nasty Nor’easter set to make landfall on my beloved city. My mindset immediately went from “I can’t wait to experience Grade-A cinema and play some retro games!” to “Welp…guess I’ll be staring out the window all weekend…” Couple that depressing forecast with the cooler-than-usual September breezes and you have the perfect recipe for a “stay in, read a few books, and eat some leftovers for dinner” type of weekend.

Since I’ve gotten so accustomed to asking ChatGPT about anything and everything, I approached four chatbots with one question in mind: “How bad is the Nor'easter going to be this weekend?” ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Muse didn’t sugarcoat their answers—here’s what they all had to say about the impending rainstorm.

What ChatGPT had to say

ChatGPT made it abundantly clear that New York City and the Tri-State Area should prepare for a rainy assault this coming weekend. It deemed Saturday the worst day for the entirety of the storm and also noted that the possibility of power outages & downed branches is expected to be high.

Here’s the rest of the chatbot’s predictions for just how severe this weekend’s Nor’easter will be:

• I'd characterize the NYC impacts as rough rather than catastrophic.
• The coast is where things could get genuinely troublesome: flooding, rough surf, beach erosion and stronger wind gusts. Inland NYC is more likely to experience a very wet, windy Saturday with unpleasant travel conditions rather than extreme storm damage.
• The storm's track still has some uncertainty, though. A modest shift closer to the coast could mean heavier rain and stronger winds for the city.
• If you have outdoor plans Saturday, I'd take them seriously. If you're driving, walking or using public transportation, I'd expect delays and poor conditions, especially Saturday afternoon/evening.
• If you tell me what part of NYC you're in (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx or Staten Island) and what you're planning to do this weekend, I can break down the specific risk by day and time.

What Gemini made me aware of

What stood out about Gemini’s weekend forecast for the Nor’easter is how it described the severity of it based on how close someone lives to the Mid-Atlantic and New England coastlines. And with the most recent updates on the storm taken from NYC.gov in mind, it noted how the storm is tracking slightly farther west (closer to shore), which could result in an increase in rainfall, stronger winds and coastal flooding risks to the 1-95 corridor and coastal communities through Sunday.

Gemini finalized its predictive weather takes by producing a helpful section entitled “Key Timeline” with the following info detailed below:

• Friday Afternoon: Clouds thicken; rain creeps into southeastern MA and the NYC tri-state area. Winds begin ramping up.
• Friday Night – Saturday Night: Peak Impact. Heaviest rain bands, highest wind gusts (up to 50–60 mph), and major coastal flooding threats around high tide.
• Sunday: Rain gradually tapers to showers, but gusty winds (30–45 mph) and rough seas persist.
• Monday: Storm pulls away offshore; conditions improve steadily.

What Claude told me

Claude gave me a bunch of predictive details worth mentioning, such as the strongest gusts are expected to hit southeast Connecticut & eastern Long Island. It also notified me that coastal flood warnings are in effect for the following areas: Nassau & Suffolk counties, Brooklyn, Queens, the Jersey Shore, coastal Connecticut and southern Westchester.

Claude’s final statement gave me an even clearer picture of what’s to come:

• Bottom line for the city: Think blustery, wet, and unpleasant rather than dangerous — secure anything loose on a balcony or rooftop, expect possible minor flooding if you're near the water, and don't plan on the beach or boardwalk. Some sporadic power outages and tree limb damage are possible especially in windier spots, but Manhattan itself should fare better than the coastal boroughs and Long Island. Things should clear out by Monday.

What Muse warned me about

To wrap up my weather forecast prediction experiment with AI, I wanted to see just how good Meta’s Muse AI agent could be when presented with forecast-related questions. Unsurprisingly, it provided me with all the essential information I needed, such as the expected start time of the worst part of the Nor’easter. To wrap up its findings, Muse laid out the following data to break down the storm through some easy-to-understand numbers and a key part of the storm that I need to keep an eye out for:

• 2–4 inches of rain for most of the Northeast (coast getting the worst of it), with flash flooding a risk — NYC's mayor issued a travel advisory after the track shifted west and closer to the city.
• Coastal wind gusts 45–60 mph, up to 65–70 mph on Cape Cod and the islands; inland gusts 30–45 mph, enough to drop trees and power lines.
• Waves up to 20 feet offshore, with coastal flooding around high tides — moderate flooding possible in southern Queens, the Rockaways, Jamaica Bay, and parts of the Brooklyn/Staten Island shorelines.
• Southeastern Virginia is already flooding from earlier high-tide cycles.
• One thing to watch: It's sitting over the very warm Gulf Stream, and AccuWeather says it could take on subtropical characteristics — meaning it could technically get named by the National Hurricane Center.

Bottom line

ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Muse’s outlook on this weekend’s Nor’easter was simple and straight to the point: it’s going to be a nasty one, so be sure to stay inside and push whatever plans you had for this weekend to the next one. As October officially begins next week, I have my hopes set on attending The Brooklyn Museum’s Art of Manga exhibition on October 3, with no chance of rain in sight.

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ChatGPT-6 and Claude Opus 5.5 arrived within days of each other, and after testing them side by side, I learned that choosing between them isn't as simple as picking a model. This is because, although Claude came out ahead in four of the five tests, the results didn't convince me to abandon ChatGPT.

Instead, the differences between the two very capable models highlighted when each one is the most valuable for any given task, particularly the ones I do every single day.

Claude Opus 5.5 consistently impresses me when a task requires judgment or when I need my messy notes or thoughts to be turned into something useful. Meanwhile, ChatGPT-6 has its own strengths, particularly when I want structure, clarity and an answer I can use immediately. The brevity of ChatGPT-6 means less fluff, which in my eyes is always a plus.

One question I often get after a face off is "Okay, so how do I know when to actually use a certain model?" Here’s where I’d use each one.

1. Planning something complicated

If I'm trying to plan something with a lot of moving parts, I'm opening Claude. Like I've mentioned, it can take messy pieces and put them together without adding or assuming anything. And frankly, this was one of the clearest differences in my testing. When I asked both models to plan a three-hour children's birthday party with a strict $150 budget, dietary restrictions and a rain contingency, both produced workable plans.

But Claude did a better job of thinking through what hosting the party would actually be like. That makes a big difference to me. I want the model to recognize potential headaches before I encounter them and make choices that reduce them.

For vacations, parties, complicated schedules or anything involving several constraints, Claude would be my first choice.

My pick: Claude Opus 5.5

2. Making a decision

Contrary to what it may seem, asking AI to help with decisions does not mean checking your brain at the door. Instead, it can help with pulling out details you may have otherwise missed.

In my tests, I gave both models a vacation-rental dilemma involving price, distance from the beach, parking costs and traveling with three children. The math was easy. The judgment, not so much.

Claude was particularly good at recognizing that the cheapest option on paper isn't necessarily the best option once inconvenience, time and repeated friction enter the equation.

That's exactly what I want from AI in this situation. I can use a calculator myself. What I need is another perspective that notices the tradeoffs I might be overlooking.

I'd use Claude for comparing vacation rentals, weighing purchases, choosing between job offers or working through other decisions where the answer can't be reduced to one number.

My pick: Claude Opus 5.5

3. Creating an organized plan I can follow

ChatGPT has long been one of my favorite tools for taking a vague goal and turning it into something structured. GPT-6 continues to be particularly useful when I need steps, categories, schedules or a framework I can immediately follow. And now that it cuts out the fluff even more, I have found that it is much more helpful.

So, at times when I'm not sure what I should do in a tricky situation, I'm more likely to ask Claude. If I know what I want to accomplish but don't know how to organize it, I'm more likely to open ChatGPT.

Think workout schedules, study plans, cleaning routines, project timelines and step-by-step instructions.

My pick: ChatGPT-6

4. Writing something that sounds natural

For writing, Claude gets the edge. This has been true for years, but Opus 5.5 is better than ever when it comes to nailing down my thoughts.

This doesn't mean I'm handing Claude a blank page and asking it to write everything for me. Where I find it particularly useful is taking something I've written and finding the grammatical mistakes, awkward transitions or even parts of the story I've completely missed. The feedback Claude gives is wildly different than ChatGPT in that it feels far more human and truly useful.

That showed up in my testing, too. Claude was better at preserving the intention of the writing without making the result feel unnecessarily polished or formulaic.

I'd reach for it when rewriting an awkward email, loosening up a work announcement, finding a better way to phrase something sensitive or figuring out why a paragraph doesn't quite sound right.

My pick: Claude Opus 5.5

5. Learning something new: ChatGPT-6

If I want someone to teach me something, I'd start with ChatGPT. It is great at getting straight to the point and simplifying complex details into something far more easy to understand.

That conversational back-and-forth is useful, especially since standard text-based chats in ChatGPT are unlimited for all users.

I can ask for a simple explanation, then an analogy, then an example, then ask it to explain the one part I'm still confused about without starting over. For subjects where I want a structured path from "I know almost nothing about this" to "I finally understand it," ChatGPT is still the AI assistant I'd reach for first.

I've used it for understanding a new technology, learning how something works, getting help with unfamiliar terminology or getting up to speed on a subject before digging into primary sources.

My pick: ChatGPT-6

6. Analyzing information and spotting what matters

Give me a pile of information and ask me what actually matters, and I'm opening Claude. One of Claude's biggest strengths is its ability to work through a lot of context without making the response feel like a summary of everything it just read.

There's a difference between summarizing and analyzing. I've also found that Claude is an excellent fact-checker and have even created a Skill to make finding the truth that much easier.

When the job is essentially "read all of this and help me think about it," Claude would be my first stop.

My pick: Claude Opus 5.5

7. Everyday questions when I just want to get something done

Siri AI has come a long way and I've even tested it against ChatGPT, but honestly, when it comes to everyday questions that need immediate answers, I still rely on ChatGPT.

Not every interaction with AI needs the most powerful reasoning model available, even though GPT-6 is pretty darn capable. The thing is, when I need quick answers like dinner ideas or a quick calculation or even what the light on my dashboard means, I still default to ChatGPT.

Part of that comes down to versatility. ChatGPT has become less like a chatbot I visit for one particular kind of task and more like a general-purpose assistant I can throw very different problems at throughout the day.

Claude may be the model I'd deliberately choose for some of the more demanding tasks on this list. ChatGPT is the one I'm more likely to open without thinking about it first.

My pick: ChatGPT-6

Bottom line

I don't pick a favorite AI assistant, and you don't have to either. You just have to know which one is best for the job you need. Claude Opus 5.5 is the one I'd reach for when the task requires judgment. Give it competing priorities, messy information or writing that needs nuance, and it has repeatedly impressed me with its ability to understand what I'm actually trying to accomplish.

ChatGPT-6 is the one I'd choose when I want to turn an idea into action. It's particularly useful for explaining, organizing and taking something vague and giving it structure.

My final tip is this: when in doubt, go with ChatGPT first, since it offers endless chatting for free. It's easier to hit your usage limit faster with Claude. What do you think? Let me know in the comments which AI assistant you use most often and for what.

More from Tom's Guide

• Nvidia says 'local AI is here' — and it could change how you use AI at home
• OpenAI is paying influencers to convince you to use ChatGPT — here’s what we know
• I tested ChatGPT-6 vs Claude Opus 5.5 with 5 everyday prompts — it wasn’t even close

If it feels like ChatGPT is showing up in more places than your browser or phone lately, it's no coincidence.

OpenAI is reportedly ramping up its use of influencers to promote ChatGPT, and it isn't limiting those partnerships to the usual tech creators talking about prompts, models and benchmarks.

Instead, the company is working with creators in areas including parenting, fitness, education, travel, shopping and careers, according to a new report from Business Insider. The goal appears to be less about explaining what ChatGPT is and more about showing how the chatbot can fit into everyday life.

And the number of sponsored posts is climbing quickly. According to HypeAuditor data cited by Business Insider, Instagram posts using #chatgpt_partner or #chatgptpartner jumped from 61 in June to 122 in July and 141 in August.

That's more than double the number of sponsored posts in just two months, and it offers a glimpse at how OpenAI is trying to turn ChatGPT into something you reach for throughout your day.

OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be more than your favorite chatbot

What's particularly interesting about OpenAI's influencer strategy is the type of content it's promoting. Business Insider reports that OpenAI has been interested in working with fitness creators, for example, because people already use ChatGPT for questions about workouts and running.

A sponsored back-to-school campaign showed a parent using ChatGPT to help her children with math homework while highlighting features including Study Mode and teen-safety tools.

Meanwhile, The Shade Room, which has more than 28 million Instagram followers, published a sponsored ChatGPT word-search puzzle. All of this highlights how OpenAI is working to encourage ChatGPT name recognition along with everyday use cases.

OpenAI now appears to be marketing individual reasons to keep using it, whether you're planning a workout, helping with homework or trying to get something done at work.

One creator who has worked with OpenAI told Business Insider that her audience already has ChatGPT. The challenge, then, isn't persuading people to try AI for the first time. It's getting them to choose ChatGPT when they do.

OpenAI is building a creator operation

There are signs this isn't just a handful of curated sponsorships. OpenAI has been expanding its creator partnerships operation and has sought employees who can help the company work with creators and influencers at scale.

Earlier this year, OpenAI also hired Charles Porch, who spent years overseeing partnerships at Instagram, to take on the role of Vice President of Global Creative Partnerships for OpenAI , according to his Linkedin profile. The company has even experimented with the kind of influencer trips normally associated with beauty, fashion and lifestyle brands.

In August, OpenAI hosted creators at a luxury retreat in New York where attendees participated in activities and workshops while learning about OpenAI products. The trip also demonstrated one of the risks of this strategy.

Some participating influencers faced criticism from followers over issues including AI's environmental impact and whether creators were compromising their independence by partnering with OpenAI. TechCrunch reported that at least one creator appeared to remove a video about the event following the backlash.

How to tell when a ChatGPT post is sponsored

There's nothing inherently unusual about OpenAI paying influencers to promote ChatGPT. Brands have used creator partnerships for years. But it's worth knowing when the enthusiastic ChatGPT recommendation appearing in your feed is an independent recommendation and when it's advertising.

The Federal Trade Commission says creators should clearly disclose when they have a material relationship with a company they're endorsing. That can include being paid, receiving free products or getting other perks.

The disclosure should also be difficult to miss rather than buried among hashtags or hidden behind a "more" button.

In OpenAI's case, hashtags including #chatgpt_partner and #chatgptpartner are one obvious clue that you're looking at sponsored content.

So, the next time a creator casually shows how ChatGPT helped plan a vacation, explain homework or build a workout, it's worth checking the caption. You may be watching an artfully curated ad campaign.

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• Nvidia says 'local AI is here' — and it could change how you use AI at home
• I replaced ChatGPT with Siri AI for a day — here's what surprised me
• AI could be costing you money: new study finds chatbots get most financial questions wrong

There’s something deeply ironic about getting fired from an AI company for using AI, but that’s reportedly exactly what happened to multiple contractors helping train OpenAI’s models.

Contractors hired to review and improve the responses generated by OpenAI’s AI models have been fired or removed from projects after using AI to do their own work, according to a new report from 404 Media.

The rule makes more sense than it might sound. These workers are being hired specifically for their human judgment — something that becomes considerably less useful if ChatGPT or another AI chatbot is doing the judging for them.

One contractor told 404 Media that they see people using AI “all the time” and that workers are regularly removed for doing it. Another contractor shared what they said was a termination letter citing problems with the “authenticity” of their work.

Keeping humans in the loop

AI models don't simply learn everything from scraping enormous amounts of text from books or the internet.

OpenAI says information provided or generated by human trainers and researchers is one of the sources used to develop its foundation models. Human feedback has also long played a role in teaching models which responses people prefer and how those models should behave.

That makes the quality of the human feedback truly important. OpenAI has previously acknowledged in its research that models trained using human feedback can be influenced by the people labeling that data.

The contractors described by 404 Media work across various OpenAI projects, some of which can involve thousands of workers. Their jobs can include reading AI responses, rating them and deciding which answers are better.

But according to internal documents obtained by 404 Media, reviewers aren't allowed to outsource that judgment back to an AI. One set of instructions reportedly prohibits workers from using AI to write feedback or comments and specifically names tools including Grammarly and AI translation.

Mercor, an AI-training company that employs contractors working on OpenAI projects, confirmed to 404 Media that its contracts prohibit workers from using large language models to complete projects.

AI detectors didn't catch the cheating

You might assume an AI company would catch workers using AI with an AI detector. Apparently not.

404 Media doesn't reveal exactly how the contractors who were fired were caught. But internal instructions obtained by the publication offer a fascinating look at how reviewers are told to spot suspected AI use.

And AI detectors aren't part of the process.

The instructions reportedly tell reviewers not to use tools such as GPTZero because they aren't considered reliable. Instead, reviewers are told to judge the overall pattern of a worker's submissions and look for clues including repetitive wording, unusually fast completion times and writing patterns associated with AI. Even excessive use of em dashes can raise suspicion.

Reviewers are also reportedly instructed not to tell workers exactly what made them suspect AI use, because doing so could make it easier to hide in the future.

This is surprisingly revealing about the process: the people checking whether humans are secretly using AI to help train ChatGPT are explicitly told not to trust AI-detection software to do it for them.

Bottom line: humans are irreplaceable

OpenAI uses a lot of synthetic data — information generated with the help of AI models — as part of some training processes. The company says synthetic data can improve model performance and fill gaps where other training data is scarce.

But that's different from secretly substituting an AI model for a person who has specifically been hired to provide human feedback. If an evaluator is supposed to tell OpenAI which response a human prefers, asking another AI to make that decision defeats much of the point of hiring the evaluator.

It doesn't mean these incidents have made ChatGPT worse, and there's no evidence in 404 Media's reporting that AI-generated contractor work caused measurable damage to an OpenAI model.

But the situation does expose one of the stranger realities of the AI boom: even the companies building the AI systems still need humans to tell those systems when they've gotten something right.

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• Nvidia says 'local AI is here' — and it could change how you use AI at home
• I replaced ChatGPT with Siri AI for a day — here's what surprised me
• AI could be costing you money: new study finds chatbots get most financial questions wrong

It’s not much of a shock when you read that AI users are tapping into the pools of knowledge AI houses to help them with their financial inquiries.

One just needs to look at the stats—according to data produced by Intuit Credit Karma that was detailed by Credit Karma, “66% of Americans surveyed who have used GenAI before say they have used it to seek financial advice, rising to 82% of Gen Z and Millennials.” Using AI to assist with one’s money questions sticks out as one of the most used applications for AI, as “finance ranks as the second most common use case for GenAI (41%), just behind health and wellness (44%).”

According to another study (called the Artificial Authority” report) conducted by an AI and technology firm called Saturn, turning AI into a financial adviser might not be the smartest move to make. Saturn’s Domain team came to that conclusion after testing 18 of the most popular AI tools, which include ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Copilot.

Saturn’s results all point to one sobering outcome: chatbots aren’t all that reliable when you’re looking for legit financial counsel.

Saturn’s benchmarking study produced some pretty alarming results

The most striking statistics produced by Saturn’s report point to the trend of AI models being wrong more often than they were right when presented with financial questions.

Across the 17 AI models that Saturn tested, the average accuracy rate they delivered came in at 43%, which means those same chatbots got financial questions wrong 57% of the time. And when presented with complex, multi-step scenarios that focused on tax rules and more precise financial figures, the accuracy of those tested AI tools fell to 12%, with mistakes made 88% of the time as well.

It doesn’t come as much of a surprise that the free AI models that were tested produced a 63% failure rate, while the paid models delivered a 49% rating instead. Claude Haiku 4.5 got the distinction of being the worst-performing free model, as it gave out wrong or incomplete answers 82% of the time. ChatGPT-5.6 Luna (max) emerged as the best-performing free model, even though its rate of giving incorrect or incomplete replies was 56% of the time.

Out of all the models that were tested, Saturn found that Anthropic’s paid-for Claude Opus 5 (reasoning) model produced the best results since it achieved a pass rate of 61%. Even with that stat that points to it being the top-performing chatbot for financial advice, Claude Opus 5 still failed to give correct answers in almost four out of every 10 cases. Even when it was presented with more complex questions, it still made mistakes 67% of the time.

What’s even more alarming about Saturn’s study is how it conducted deep dives into the specific errors it came across from the AI models it tested that could result in severe financial outcomes. For instance, one model came up with a rule that said a college graduate could halt their student loan payments by moving abroad (in reality, doing so could actually lead to higher monthly repayments). Also, a Gemini model that was tested incorrectly told a borrower that taking a mortgage payment holiday wouldn’t affect their credit score.

Bottom line

Saturn’s report points to a sobering truth that many AI users need to come to grips with: AI financial advice remains unreliable and can leave its users prone to losing tons of money instead of making more of it.

A March 2026 report from EY highlighted how 53% of respondents prefer using an AI assistant to make financial investment decisions, while 14% prefer using an autonomous AI and 33% said they wouldn’t use any form of AI in such a case.

Thanks to Saturn’s findings, that 14% statistic may increase as AI users refrain from asking their chatbots personal questions about debt management, student loans, mortgages, pensions, inheritance tax and retirement planning.

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• Nvidia says 'local AI is here' — and it could change how you use AI at home
• OpenAI's new ad tracker may know what you do after you leave ChatGPT — here's what we know
• Apple's $250 million class action settlement website is now open — here's how eligible iPhone owners can file a claim and how much they'll get

An independent researcher has uncovered what appears to be a cross-site tracking system connected to OpenAI's rapidly growing advertising business. At the center of it is a cookie called "__obi," which can reportedly travel from ChatGPT to websites using OpenAI's advertising technology.

That means if you use ChatGPT and later visit a participating retailer or other website, OpenAI may be able to recognize the same browser and receive information about what you do there.

The finding comes at a particularly interesting time. OpenAI has been rapidly expanding advertising inside ChatGPT, recently announcing new AI-powered advertising tools and Sponsored Agents. The company said last month that ChatGPT Ads had already reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate.

But this isn't quite as simple as assuming ChatGPT is watching everything you do online. There are some important limitations to the research, including one major piece of the system the researcher wasn't able to independently verify.

Here's what we know.

What is __obi?

The research comes from an independent researcher who publishes under the name Buchodi and says they analyzed months of network traffic involving 936 OpenAI advertiser pixels across 1,029 hostnames.

According to the analysis, visiting ChatGPT can result in OpenAI placing a cookie called __obi in your browser.

Cookies themselves aren't unusual; you've probably accepted them on a several websites. They're small pieces of information stored by your browser and are used for everything from keeping you logged into a website to remembering preferences and measuring advertising.

What's interesting here is how this particular cookie is configured. Buchodi found that __obi can last for one year and uses the SameSite=None setting, which allows it to be included in certain requests originating from other websites.

That's where OpenAI's advertising system comes in. Businesses advertising through ChatGPT can install OpenAI's measurement pixel on their websites, similar to the tracking technology used by advertising platforms such as Google and Meta.

When Buchodi visited participating websites, requests sent back to OpenAI included the __obi identifier. In other words, the same identifier created through ChatGPT could show up again when that browser visited another website.

What can OpenAI see?

Potentially more than simply whether you visited a website. According to Buchodi's network analysis, OpenAI's advertising collector received information associated with pages people visited and conversion events on participating sites.

The researcher examined 23,929 observed URLs and found that query strings were stripped before being sent to OpenAI, but URL paths remained.

A URL path can sometimes reveal considerable information about what someone is looking at. Buchodi says paths observed in the dataset included pages involving a medical condition, debt services and a litigation intake form.

The advertising system also supports what OpenAI calls conversion measurement.

OpenAI's own documentation says advertisers can install a pixel and use conversion measurement to understand what happens after someone interacts with a ChatGPT ad. Its measurement integrations can support conversion tracking and attribution across websites, apps and even offline activity.

That's standard practice in digital advertising. What's unusual is that the advertising platform in this case sits alongside an AI assistant where users may share substantially more personal context than they would with a traditional search engine or social network.

Is it connected to your ChatGPT account?

This is where the story gets more complicated. Buchodi found that the process used to generate the identifier included tokens labeled either account_user or anonymous.

Of 932 tokens the researcher decoded, 736 were associated with logged-in users and 196 were labeled anonymous. The researcher also found that anonymous identifiers could remain stable on the same device for at least 27 days.

However, there's an important caveat. Buchodi did not directly observe OpenAI taking an event received from an advertiser website and joining it to a person's ChatGPT account on its servers.

The researcher argues that the architecture makes such a connection possible, but that final server-side step wasn't independently observed.

So it would be premature to say OpenAI definitively attaches every page you visit on participating sites to your ChatGPT profile. What the research does demonstrate is that the same OpenAI identifier can be transmitted from participating websites back to OpenAI.

Buchodi says the identifier appeared across a number of recognizable websites during testing. On one device, the same __obi value was sent to OpenAI from 12 commercial websites using 13 separate advertising pixels. Across the larger dataset, 12 of 30 identifiers appeared with more than one advertiser, while one appeared across 10 different advertisers.

The researcher also notes several important limitations. Testing was performed using Chrome on Android, and desktop Chrome wasn't tested. Safari's anti-tracking protections block the third-party cookie mechanism described in the research, meaning it shouldn't operate the same way on Safari or other iOS browsers using Apple's WebKit.

The identifier also wasn't generated during every ChatGPT session. Buchodi estimates that roughly one in five sessions tested produced the synchronization token.

What does OpenAI say?

OpenAI hasn't publicly responded to the specific findings. Buchodi says they contacted OpenAI's press and privacy teams on September 14 and asked why __obi was classified as an analytics cookie and how it behaves when someone rejects marketing cookies.

According to the researcher, OpenAI acknowledged the inquiry and said the findings would be passed along internally but had not provided answers to those questions when the research was published.

Tom's Guide has contacted OpenAI for comment and will update this story if we hear back.

OpenAI's public documentation emphasizes that advertisers do not receive ChatGPT conversations, chat histories, memories or personal details.

The company also says it does not sell user data to advertisers, and advertisers receive aggregated reporting about things such as views, clicks and conversions.

That's an important distinction here: the research does not suggest advertisers themselves can read your ChatGPT conversations or access the __obi identifier.

Instead, the concern is about information potentially flowing in the other direction — from websites using OpenAI's advertising tools back to OpenAI.

Why this matters

Cross-site advertising measurement isn't new. In fact, Google, Meta and other advertising companies have spent years building systems designed to determine whether someone who saw or clicked an ad later visited a website or bought something. But ChatGPT introduces another dimension.

People don't just search for products using ChatGPT. They use it to discuss relationships, health concerns, finances, careers, travel plans and countless other parts of their lives.

OpenAI itself promotes ChatGPT advertising around this idea, telling advertisers that people share "richer context" in ChatGPT while exploring options and making decisions.

That's why the boundary between your ChatGPT activity and what you do elsewhere on the web matters.

For now, the evidence doesn't show that OpenAI is handing your conversations to advertisers — and OpenAI explicitly says it doesn't.

But the discovery of __obi raises a different question: how much information should be able to flow back into an AI platform after you leave it?

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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