AI Tips #3: Improve ChatGPT Conversations with Personal Context
Wondering why your ChatGPT interactions often yield responses that are off the mark? Read on to learn how to fine-tune your AI chats with personal context
Ever wondered why your interactions with ChatGPT (or other AI chatbots) sometimes yield responses that seem ... off the mark? ⁉💬
It's not just you! Many AI chatbot users find that they receive generic answers or else struggle to extract contextually relevant insights. But why is that, and how can we fine-tune our chatbot conversations to be as fruitful as possible? 🍊
Context is Key
Think of ChatGPT, Copilot, Google Bard and other such AI chatbots as an intern. A very smart one, but with limited knowledge of your personal and organisational nuances. Just as you'd brief an intern to ensure their contributions are on point, providing ChatGPT with as much context about your needs will massively enhance the relevance of its responses 😀
(Read this article which I had previously written in case you’re interested in learning more about how AI models such as ChatGPT are able to understand and respond in a contextually-relevant manner.)
ChatGPT Plus Subscribers: Custom Instructions 🧠
For ChatGPT Plus subscribers, the "Custom Instructions" feature allows users to inform the AI about their unique context. Navigate to your account profile (bottom left of your screen in ChatGPT) and click on "Custom Instructions" by filling out information about yourself and how you prefer ChatGPT to respond. A similar feature is also available with the paid version of Claude.
Non-ChatGPT Plus Subscribers: Alternative Hack 🔨
Fret not if you're not a ChatGPT Plus subscriber (or if you routinely use other AI chatbots). You can still craft a detailed brief including your professional and personal context and have it ready to paste at the start of each interaction. This might include:
🎯 Goals, occupation, and organisational specifics
🌍 Geographic location and travel habits
👥 Daily routines and key interactions
🎹 Personal aspirations and hobbies
✏️ Preferred response styles and formats
Updating and Diversifying Your AI Profiles 🔄
As our lives evolve, so should our interactions with AI. Regularly updating your context ensures ChatGPT remains aligned with your needs. Moreover, maintaining different profiles for distinct tasks or roles, for instance a "developer persona" for your coding tasks, or a "social media persona" for your content generation tasks, can help improve the specificity of your AI interactions across various use cases.
Key Watchout 👀
Beware of sharing highly private context and information. The balance will be different for everyone. For instance, I'd be comfortable letting ChatGPT know how many children I have, but I probably wouldn't be comfortable sharing the specifics of their ages and names. From a professional perspective, you should also be considering the context of your organisation and role and what you can share and what you should not.
Example: Presentation Agenda
To illustrate the difference in quality and relevance of responses with and without personal context, I’ve prepared a brief example based around the simple prompt, “Draft an agenda for a 2-hour presentation that I will be delivering. Keep your response succinct and concise.”
In the first response below, I switched off ChatGPT’s “Custom Instructions” and the result was a bland-looking agenda that could have come from any presentation. No surprise there because my prompt was basic and I didn’t include any context.
I then enabled ChatGPT’s “Custom Instructions” (see below) for the next chat, which includes details about my professional background, and with exactly the same prompt. Despite the brevity of the prompt, the outcome was nonetheless a fairly well-customised response that was tailored to my specific role as an AI strategist and trainer.
Your turn to give it a go and you'll be amazed at the extent to which ChatGPT's responses will improve for you! 🌟
P.S. If there are any workflows, task, or processes that you are struggling with, please feel free to reach out. If it’s in my wheelhouse, I’ll aim to make an article out of it!
Justin Tan is passionate about supporting organisations and teams to navigate disruptive change and towards sustainable and robust growth. He founded Evolutio Consulting in 2021 to help senior leaders to upskill and accelerate adoption of AI within their organisation through AI literacy and proficiency training, and also works with his clients to design and build bespoke AI solutions that drive growth and productivity for their businesses. If you're pondering how to harness these technologies in your business, or simply fancy a chat about the latest developments in AI, why not reach out?