How-To

Last updated: February 2026 | Reading time: 8 minutes You’ve just gotten blood test results back from your doctor. There’s a column of numbers, some with little arrows pointing up or down, a lot of abbreviations you don’t recognize, and a follow-up appointment that’s two weeks away. So you paste it into ChatGPT. Millions of people are doing exactly this — and it’s actually useful, as long as you understand what you’re getting and what you’re not. ...

ChatGPT is useful enough that people share things with it they’d never say out loud in public. Confidential work documents. Medical symptoms. Financial details. Legal situations. Personal struggles. That raises a fair question: is that safe? What actually happens to what you type? The answer is nuanced, and the right response isn’t “never use it” or “it’s totally fine.” It’s knowing what the actual risks are so you can make a smart call. ...

Everyone wants to know if something was written by AI. Teachers checking student essays. Editors vetting freelance submissions. Employers screening job applications. Publishers trying to maintain standards. The problem: AI detection is genuinely hard, and most tools oversell how reliable they are. Here’s what actually works in 2026, and what the limits are. Why AI Detection Is Harder Than It Sounds AI language models — including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others — generate text by predicting what words should come next. They produce fluent, coherent prose with varied sentence structure. The better the model, the harder it is to tell from human writing. ...

You’ve got a 40-page PDF. Could be a contract, a research paper, a report your boss sent, or a manual for something you bought three years ago. You need the key points. You don’t have time to read the whole thing. Good news: ChatGPT can help. Bad news: it’s not as simple as “upload and summarize.” Let me walk you through what actually works, free-first. Why PDF Summarization Is Trickier Than It Sounds ChatGPT reads text. PDFs are sometimes text, sometimes images of text, sometimes a nightmare combination of both. If your PDF was scanned rather than digitally created, ChatGPT can’t read it directly — it just sees an image. So the method you use depends on what kind of PDF you have. ...

You’ve heard about ChatGPT everywhere — at work, on the news, from your kids. Maybe you’ve tried it and gotten something useful back. Maybe you’ve tried it and gotten nonsense. Either way, you probably still have a nagging question: what actually is this thing? Here’s the honest answer, no computer science degree required. It’s a Text Prediction Machine (a Very Good One) At its core, ChatGPT is a language model. That sounds fancy, but it just means: a system trained to predict what word (or phrase) should come next, given everything that came before it. ...

ChatGPT’s mobile app is better than most people expect. It’s not just a chat interface — it supports voice conversations, camera input, memory, and Siri/Google Assistant integration. If you’re still using ChatGPT only on desktop, you’re leaving a lot of utility behind. Here’s how to set it up properly on both iPhone and Android. Download the Right App This sounds obvious, but it matters: only download from OpenAI directly. There are hundreds of ChatGPT-branded apps on both app stores, many of them monetizing a thin wrapper around the free API. Some are fine; some are shady. To get the actual OpenAI product: ...

The faces you see online are not always real. AI can generate photorealistic human faces from scratch, swap faces onto existing video in real time, and produce audio that sounds exactly like a specific person saying things they never said. This isn’t a future threat. It’s the current landscape. Here’s how to recognize it. Why This Matters AI-generated faces appear in: Fake news articles with invented experts and quotes Romance scam profiles on dating apps and social media Astroturfing campaigns with armies of fake reviewers Political disinformation using fabricated video statements Business fraud (“CEO” video calls authorizing wire transfers) Fake stock photos and testimonials on scam websites Being able to spot the signs isn’t paranoia — it’s a basic media literacy skill in 2026. ...

Custom GPTs are one of the most underused features of ChatGPT Plus. The idea is simple: instead of explaining your context and preferences every time you open a new chat, you build a version of ChatGPT that already knows them — your role, your style, your use case, your data. You can build one without writing a single line of code. Here’s how. What’s a Custom GPT? A Custom GPT is a configured version of ChatGPT with: ...

Meal planning sounds simple in theory. In practice, it’s a weekly mental tax: figuring out what to cook, whether you have the ingredients, how long each recipe takes, whether your household will actually eat it. Most people don’t meal plan consistently because the upfront effort feels too high. ChatGPT makes this genuinely easy. Here’s how to use it to plan a full week of meals and walk away with a complete grocery list — in about ten minutes. ...

Excel is one of the most powerful tools in the world — and one of the most intimidating. The formula syntax is cryptic, the function library is enormous, and one wrong parenthesis crashes everything. Most people use maybe 5% of what Excel can do because the rest feels like learning a programming language. ChatGPT changes that. You describe what you want in plain English, and it writes the formula. No syntax memorization required. ...