Complete Beginner’s Guide to GPTs (Part 1): What They Are and How to Use Them

What are GPTs?

GPTs are “customized ChatGPTs” that let users create specialized conversational agents. They build on the ChatGPT ecosystem, inheriting its dialogue abilities while adding extensions such as custom knowledge bases, web browsing, drawing, code interpreter, and external API calls.

How to use GPTs?

Prerequisites

You need a way to access foreign AI services (often referred to as “magic”).

You must have a ChatGPT Plus (or higher Team) subscription.

Plus members can create and use GPTs and also gain access to GPT‑4, DALL·E 3, image recognition, and the code interpreter, for a monthly fee of $20.

Interface

Open ChatGPT, click “Explore GPTs” in the left‑hand menu to open the GPTs store.

The store page shows a search box, category navigation, recommended and popular GPTs, and official releases. Your own GPTs appear at the top of the sidebar.

Example walkthrough

The article demonstrates the “Logo Creator” GPT. After opening it, the interface looks like the familiar ChatGPT chat window, with the GPT’s name displayed at the top left.

The bottom bar includes shortcut prompts that suggest how to start a conversation. Clicking a prompt such as “Help me create a logo about ice cream” sends the text automatically.

The GPT then asks follow‑up questions (style, primary color, number of concepts, etc.) to gather requirements. Once the information is collected, it invokes the built‑in DALL·E 3 model to generate images.

This flow illustrates the typical multi‑turn dialogue pattern that GPTs use to accomplish more complex tasks.

Preview of the next article

The next installment will explore GPT development techniques and analyze the five major tools available for building GPTs.