Custom Instructions: A New Feature You Must Enable to Improve ChatGPT Responses
Prompting gets a bit easier with this new ChatGPT feature.
Remember that prompt engineering technique called Role Prompting that allows us to control the default behavior of ChatGPT to get customized results?
It started with something like “Act as a …”. and you had to include it in every single chat to get better responses.
Well, now you can control how ChatGPT responds in every chat by using custom instructions. This can change your whole experience with ChatGPT and, in this article, we’ll see how to make the most of it.
First Things First — Enable Custom Instructions
To enable custom instructions, just like with plugins, go to the bottom-left corner and click on “Settings & Beta.”
The window below will pop up. Select “Beta features” and enable custom instructions.
Note that custom instructions is available to ChatGPT Plus users. Also, keep in mind that this feature is not yet available in the UK and EU (a VPN can easily help you with this though)
How does it work?
To open Custom Instructions, go again to the bottom-left corner and click on the three dots. There you should see the option “Custom Instructions.” Click on it.
Here’s the Custom Instructions window. We’re going to edit the two sections to get customized results from ChatGPT.
Now let’s see some use cases to make the most of this new feature.
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Example #1: Change the tone and format of ChatGPT’s responses
Have you noticed the tone and writing style of ChatGPT is always the same by default?
If you want ChatGPT to get a closer tone and writing style to yours, just tell them about your work and interests in Question #1.
Here’s an example (taken from OpenAI demo):
Q1: What would you like ChatGPT to know about you to provide better responses?
- I work on science education programs for third-grade students.
After describing some key things about you and your work, ChatGPT will its writing style.
Other information you can provide is the following:
- Where are you based?
- What do you do for work?
- What are your hobbies and interests?
- What subjects can you talk about for hours?
- What are some goals you have?
So far we made ChatGPT know more about us.
But we can customize the responses even further with Question #2. In this question, you can customize the response’s tone, length, format, etc.
Say every time ChatGPT provides suggestions, you want to get the pros and cons of each suggestion and also want the information to be presented in a table, so it’s easy to make a comparison.
Here’s what you can do.
Q2: How would you like ChatGPT to respond?
When discussing potential solutions for work-related items, present the information in a table format, outlining the pros and cons of each option — allowing for easier comparison and decision-making.
Say I want to know important things to teach about the big bang theory.
As you can see, I don’t have to tell ChatGPT that I work on science or how I want the response to be formatted because that’s already specified in the custom instructions and that will remain for future chats.
Example #2: Tell ChatGPT your personal preferences
As you might know, ChatGPT’s training data is uneven for some categories. For example, it has more data in the English language than in another language and if you’re a programmer you might also know that it was trained with more Python code than another programming language.
That’s the reason why ChatGPT by default might reply to you in English or write Python code for you. The good news is that now you can control your preferred language of choice once and don’t worry anymore.
Say you’re a data scientist that has zero knowledge of Python, and mostly does analysis in R. Here’s how you can customize ChatGPT.
Q1: What would you like ChatGPT to know about you to provide better responses?
I’m a data scientist and solely use R.
Q2: How would you like ChatGPT to respond?
When I ask you for code, please just give me the code without any explanation on how it works.
As you can see, we didn’t only tell ChatGPT to provide only R code but also to skip any extra explanation (ChatGPT’s chattery is sometimes annoying!)
Let’s test it out!
Example #3: A super prompt that will control ChatGPT further
If you want to take custom instructions to the next level, you can add a lot of details that go beyond the previous examples we’ve seen.
Here’s a demo.
Feel free to copy and edit the details in the tweet above to get the most out of this new feature.
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