ChatGPT's latest feature, known as "custom instructions," aims to reduce your typing efforts. It allows you to provide specific details to the chatbot about yourself, ensuring it remembers essential information and tailors its responses to your preferences. The beta feature is available across all platforms where ChatGPT is accessible, particularly beneficial for mobile users. As of now, it is offered to ChatGPT Plus subscribers globally, excluding the UK and EU (with plans to extend availability soon).
Currently, ChatGPT lacks knowledge about users beyond the ongoing conversation. However, custom instructions can fill this gap by establishing a constant reference for the chatbot. For instance, a teacher might input "I teach third grade" to receive age-appropriate Moon facts for lesson planning. Those with a large family may specify their household size, enabling ChatGPT to recommend suitable portion sizes for cooking and shopping. Similarly, programmers can set their preferred coding language to receive code answers accordingly.
Think of custom instructions as a permanent preamble to your queries. Instead of crafting long, context-heavy questions each time, you can include that relevant information in your custom instructions, which will be readily available for every interaction.
Though the implementation and interpretation of custom instructions are still being refined, they have the potential to add complexity to queries, potentially leading to erroneous or irrelevant responses. OpenAI is actively using the beta phase to fine-tune the model's understanding of when and how to apply these guidelines.
In the future, custom instructions may become more dynamic and interactive, allowing ChatGPT to learn about you while you provide information about yourself. OpenAI is careful to ensure that custom instructions cannot override the system's safety measures, preventing misuse or harmful content. Personally identifying information is also removed from instructions and queries to safeguard user privacy.
The ultimate goal of custom instructions is to enable ChatGPT to become a more efficient and personalized virtual assistant, understanding your needs and preferences to provide timely and helpful responses.