Update: OpenAI officially announced this feature a week after some users reported the new options arriving and then disappearing. It is possible that they died prematurely.
OpenAI is introducing a new way for users to personalize their interactions with ChatGPT, the company’s AI-powered chatbot.
On Friday, OpenAI announced that it is rolling out a new user interface for ChatGPT’s custom instructions menu, including new ways to customize the chatbot’s features. The feature will first appear on ChatGPT.com and the Windows desktop app, according to OpenAI, and will come to mobile and MacOS desktop apps in the coming weeks.
The new interface will not be immediately available to ChatGPT users in the EU, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, OpenAI said in a tweet on Friday.
Several users on X reported last week that ChatGPT’s existing web custom instructions menu has been revamped with new fields. Now, users can specify a preferred name or nickname, their occupation, other things they’d like ChatGPT to know about them, and “features” they’d like the chatbot to have. OpenAI suggests features like Chatty, Encouraging, and Gen Z.
Important to note is that this is unrelated to ChatGPT’s memory feature, which allows users to explicitly tell ChatGPT to remember – or forget – something. Confusingly, ChatGPT “memories” can be personal details – but they can also cover a wider range of information relevant to the conversation.
“Introduce yourself to get better and more personalized responses,” reads a message on the refreshed menu.
Options are not yet showing for this reporter. TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for comment and will update this article if we hear back.
It is likely that the new menu will be more of an aesthetic change than a deep technical improvement. The old custom guidelines feature used what’s known as rapid engineering to guide the style and tone of ChatGPT. Essentially, he “primed” the AI-powered ChatGPT with a paragraph of user-supplied instructions so that its responses would adhere to those requests and preferences.
As far as we can tell, the new menu still relies on quick engineering. It just presents it in a more user-friendly way.
OpenAI previously said it applies moderation to custom instructions to check that they adhere to its terms of use. Apparently, this hasn’t changed with the revamped customization settings.
OpenAI has been trying to polish ChatGPT as its user base grows, adding capabilities like live web search and a “Canvas” interface tailored for writing and coding projects. The company said in December that over 300 million people use the chatbot every week.
