The best ChatGPT plug-ins you can use

By Jon Martindale April 12, 2024

AI PDF custom GPT. — Jon Martindale / DigitalTrends

ChatGPT is an amazing tool, and when they were introduced, plug-ins made it even better. But as of March 2024, they’re no longer available as part of ChatGPT, having since been replaced by Custom GPTs, which you can make yourself. Or you can use one of the many amazing options from other developers, AI fans, and prompt engineers.

Interested in learning about how to make the best custom GPT for you? We have a guide for that. If you’re more interested in the best custom GPTs available now, we have a guide for that too.

ChatGPT and other natural language model artificial intelligences (AI) are evolving all the time, with new and exciting features, and ever-more-impressive capabilities. Other companies are right there with OpenAI, too. Microsoft’s Copilot for Windows is improving by leaps and bounds every time it’s updated. And Google’s Gemini isn’t far behind.

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Artificial Intelligence

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Computing

ChatGPT shortly devolved into an AI mess

A response from ChatGPT on an Android phone.

I've seen my fair share of unhinged AI responses -- not the least of which was when Bing Chat told me it wanted to be human last year -- but ChatGPT has stayed mostly sane since it was first introduced. That's changing, as users are flooding social media with unhinged, nonsensical responses coming from the chatbot.

In a lot of reports, ChatGPT simply spits out gibberish. For example, u/Bullroarer_Took took to the ChatGPT subreddit to showcase a response in which a series of jargon and proper sentence structure gives the appearance of a response, but a close read shows the AI spitting out nonsense.

Computing

The best custom GPTs to make ChatGPT even more powerful

A person typing on a laptop that is showing the ChatGPT generative AI website.

The introduction of Custom GPTs was one of the most exciting additions to ChatGPT in recent months. These allow you to craft custom chatbots with their own instructions and data by feeding them documents, weblinks, and more to make sure they know what you need and respond how you would like them to.

But you don't have to make your own Custom GPT if you don't want to. Indeed, there are tens of thousands of Custom GPTs already made by engineers around the world, and many of them are very impressive.

Computing

This one image breaks ChatGPT each and every time

A laptop screen shows the home page for ChatGPT, OpenAI's artificial intelligence chatbot.

Sending images as prompts to ChatGPT is still a fairly new feature, but in my own testing, it works fine most of the time. However, someone's just found an image that ChatGPT can't seem to handle, and it's definitely not what you expect.

The image, spotted by brandon_xyzw on X (formerly Twitter), presents some digital noise. It's nothing special, really -- just a black background with some vertical lines all over it. But if you try to show it to ChatGPT, the image breaks the chatbot each and every time, without fail.