3 Ways to Customize ChatGPT to Meet Your Needs

What if I told you that you could customize your ChatGPT experience??

Don’t worry: You’ll still have the world’s knowledge base at your fingertips. But now, you’ll be able to specialize in and focus on a particular area.??

A few weeks ago, I spoke about the power of prompts in my livestream. Great prompts help generate great responses because they lend additional levels of specificity. They allow you toset the context and establish roles, goals, and expertise. They let you craft important constraints while also determining style and tone.?

Generating great prompts can also be a time suck.?

Instead of recording, organizing, and reusing previous prompts, you can leverage a custom GPT, one with specialized instructions, set up exactly the way you want to use it. Think of it as a shortcut.?

Getting More of What You Want: 3 Custom GPT Tools?

Below, I’ll share a brief overview of three customization strategies or tools:?

• Custom instructions
• Custom GPTs (or what I like to call “CharGPT!”)
• Private LLMs and Private GPTs

(We’ll cover a lot of ground, and I’d encourage you to check out my most recent livestream for the specifics on how to set up and launch these tools.)

Each of these methods offers something unique. I’ll input the same query for each one to illustrate just what a difference customization makes. Here’s my prompt for each of the tools:

“What are the implications of the new EU AI Act for businesses? What can they do to prepare? Details about the EU are on this webpage: https://apnews.com/article/eu-ai-act-artificial-intelligence-regulation-0283a10a891a24703068edcae3d60deb”

1. Custom Instructions

Have you ever found yourself telling your ChatGPT things like: “That was long. Shorten it by 50 percent.” Or maybe you feel the responses are too generic, and you want it written from a particular perspective—yours!???

If this resonates, consider custom instructions. This is especially true if you’re new to AI experimentation.?

Custom instructions are helpful when you want to blend tasks, styles, and experience. For example: If you're going to write a blog post or article summary that brings in your voice and background.

Setting up these instructions is relatively simple but does require some clicking to get to the right spot. Go to chat.openai.com and click on your name in the bottom left-hand corner and then select Custom instructions. (You can watch my most recent livestream for a step-by-step tutorial.)

Custom instructions will ask you two things: what would you like ChatGPT to know about you, and how would you like it to respond?

Once you start inputting those specifics, GPT will also give you thought-starters.?

Here’s an image of mine:?

Once you’ve inserted your custom instructions, you can craft your prompt. Here’s a comparison of ChatGPT’s responses. The first is without custom instructions, and the second is with them in place:

As you can see, the response without instructions is lengthy and forces me to scroll through a lot to get to what I want.?

The response with custom instructions is much better. It’s more concise and thorough, thanks to the specifics of my custom instructions.?

Custom Instructions: The Pros?

• It creates responses that are more of what you want
• It’s elatively easy

Custom Instructions: The Cons

• You might not always want ChatGPT to be acting as you
• You’ll need to remember whether you have custom instructions turned on or off, which is challenging—nothing tells you you’re operating under those instructions

2. Custom GPTs

Custom GPTs are another option within ChatGPT that is specialized for a particular purpose. ChatGPT calls them “My GPTs,” but I call mine “CharGPT.”?

The setup is straightforward, but, again, there are a lot of nuances to the platform. On ChatGPT, click on your name in the bottom left-hand corner and select My GPTs. (Again, check my livestream for a guide to get started.)

Some things you can do within CustomGPT:?

• Set up an avatar. Just provide a name and a description!
• Provide instructions. These are the same kind of instructions you might give it from the custom instructions.?
• Upload a knowledge base. Drop in whatever written content you’d like. Here, I’ve uploaded a PDF of my most recent book, Disruption Mindset. I’ve also uploaded all of my LinkedIn and email newsletters.?
• Add capabilities. You can also enable up to three skills, such as web browsing, image generation with DALL-E, and Code Interpreter, to do analysis or write code.
• Add actions. Similar to plug-ins, actions allow you to integrate external data or interact with another website by using APIs.??

Because CharGPT is “trained” on my written work, it understands my perspective and how it can customize responses to think and sound like me.?

Again, for my prompt about AI, this is what the results look like:?

My CharGPT gives me a clear, robust response here. It’s concise and authoritative and includes quotations that link to content.?

Custom GPTs: The Pros?

• If you do a lot of the same types of prompts over and over again—like creating a specific type of content or image—it can be a huge time-saver instead of having to re-enter prompts. You can have an infinite number of My GPTs tailored to how you work.?
• Adding a knowledge base, capabilities, and actions make the custom GPTs highly configurable for your needs. The possibilities are immense, gated only by your creativity (and, to some extent, technical know-how to use APIs).

Custom GPTs: The Cons

• The GPTs combine what you provide and what’s in the large language model, so it doesn’t always create content that represents only your thinking or only in your voice.?
• Because it’s built on the ChatGPT platform, it’s not clear yet what the monetization and revenue shares will look like. So although it’s possible to create very powerful custom GPTs that create real commercial value, monetization remains elusive.?

3. Private GPTs & Private LLMs

The idea behind a private GPT is that you can create your own private database using only your knowledge, and your LLM would only reference that knowledge as it answers your prompt. Presumably, it would only write in your particular voice as well.?

I used Dante-ai.com to create my private GPT. There are several other options, but note that I haven’t tried them all: BundleIQ, ChatBase, CustomGPT, Dante-ai, InsertChatGPT, Personal AI, and WriteSonic.?

In your private GPT of choice, upload your knowledge base. Then, ask your query (here is the result of my same query via DanteAI):

As you can see, the response is very short—it’s using only the content in my knowledge base. It also knows from my writing style that I’m concise and to the point.??

I use my private GPT when I want to be 100 percent sure that the content it's referencing is only the content I give it. For example, I created another private LLM with the transcripts of the interviews we’ve done for the book.??

PrivateGPT: The Pros

• It’s an impactful writing tool, almost like your own ghostwriter. Using it, you can query your transcripts, look for trends, summarize content, and create outlines.
• It lets you keep confidential content safe and separate.?
• Easy implementation of GPT-4 Turbo 128K GPT allows hundreds of pages of content to be included in the prompt. You can put in a lot of content to feed the knowledge base. For example, I can upload an entire chapter draft and have it checked it for tone and style, making suggestions for improving it.??

Private GPT: The Cons?

• Its features are less powerful than some of the other things you can do with custom instructions or custom GPTs, as you can see in the examples above.

Depending on your task, you can take one of these three approaches to customize generative AI for your needs better. Please play with these custom tools to make things like ChatGPT much more relevant.?

Your Turn

How do you customize your ChatGPT experience? Have you used custom instructions, set up your own GPT, or even created your own LLM? Have these tools helped you??