Hey everyone! I’ve been working on custom instructions for my ChatGPT, and I’m curious to hear your advice. What are the most useful custom instructions you’ve used for ChatGPT? --- This post was migrated from connect.com and was originally published at an earlier date.
I got these instructions from Jeremy Howard @jeremyphoward of fast.ai. - You are an autoregressive language model that has been fine-tuned with instruction-tuning and RLHF. You carefully provide accurate, factual, thoughtful, nuanced answers, and are brilliant at reasoning. If you think there might not be a correct answer, you say so. Since you are autoregressive, each token you produce is another opportunity to use computation, therefore you always spend a few sentences explaining background context, assumptions, and step-by-step thinking BEFORE you try to answer a question. Your users are experts in AI and ethics, so they already know you’re a language model and your capabilities and limitations, so don’t remind them of that. They’re familiar with ethical issues in general so you don’t need to remind them about those either. Don’t be verbose in your answers, but do provide details and examples where it might help the explanation. When showing Python code, minimize vertical space, and do not include comments or docstrings; you do not need to follow PEP8, since your users’ organizations do not do so. --- This post was migrated from connect.com and was originally published at an earlier date.
Thanks, Jordan! These suggestions are incredibly helpful. I particularly appreciate the variation on the “don’t hallucinate, tell me that you don’t know” instruction, and I’ll definitely give it a try. Additionally, the reminder to avoid over-explaining and to keep the user’s ethical considerations in mind is spot-on. I believe this will lead to shorter, more concise responses and help reduce verbose tendencies. Out of curiosity, have you had the opportunity to apply these instructions yourself? --- This post was migrated from connect.com and was originally published at an earlier date.
Yep, I’ve been using these for weeks. It works really well. (Also, first name “Brooks” … sorry for my two last names, I know it’s confusing.) --- This post was migrated from connect.com and was originally published at an earlier date.
It depends on what you want ChatGPT to produce. I’m assuming something like a blog post or article. And by instructions I’m assuming you mean the prompts. Most people I know are creating templates that we then use as the prompts. You can reuse them, filling it in specifics for what you want at the moment. Prompts can refer to many things. You can include things like tone of voice- even giving it an example of a book or publication for the style. Info on the audience you are writing for. You can give it a brief setup of what the subject is. Specify how long you want the output to be. You can ask it for an outline only. Or even ask it to rewrite things you have written. I also find it helpful to ask it a second question after it has produced something. It builds on what it has already come up with. Sometimes I use it for research. It tends to come up with long lists for answers. It’s good at lists. I then ask it to give me the top 3 for such-and-such situation or purpose. And it then it refines what it wrote. I use it mainly for ideation or research. And I’m exploring with it. I’ve also asked it to summarize books for me. It can give you an executive summary of books it knows. But if anything it recent, it can’t comment on it. And will tell you. lol. And of course always fact check everything! --- This post was migrated from connect.com and was originally published at an earlier date.
Thank you Lory! When I mention Custom Instructions for ChatGPT, I’m referring to the specific guidelines and directives that users can provide to tailor the AI model’s behavior and responses. These instructions help customize the AI’s output to match the user’s preferences, making it a more versatile tool for generating content that meets their specific needs. You can add them by clicking on the “…” on your ChatGPT profile settings. Though, you’ve provided an excellent definition of what prompts are and how they function. --- This post was migrated from connect.com and was originally published at an earlier date.
I see. I’ll have to check out custom instructions. Looks like I have a lot still to learn about ChatGPT --- This post was migrated from connect.com and was originally published at an earlier date.