With over 900 million users, OpenAI’s flagship chatbot keeps getting more integrated into our daily lives. But most people don't realize that ChatGPT doesn’t need to be the same for everyone.
ChatGPT's Personalization feature has been evolving since it first launched as Custom Instructions in 2023, giving users the ability to change how ChatGPT responds by being more professional, steering the model toward a warmer tone, or simply telling it to stop using emojis.
Today, those controls live in ChatGPT's Personalization settings, where users can choose from preset traits like Friendly, Candid, or Cynical. They now also live in the Memory settings, where you can set a nickname, share your occupation, write custom instructions for how you want the model to respond, and toggle memory to let ChatGPT carry context across conversations.
The Deep View sat down with OpenAI’s Laurentia Romaniuk, product manager for model behavior, to learn how ChatGPT’s personality is formed and how users can customize it.
User context is vital to making AI more useful. Without an understanding of a user’s data, these models can’t provide the most useful outputs. Personality preferences now represent part of that context, said Romaniuk.
For instance, if a user wants a thought partner for brainstorming, they may lean towards warmer interactions. If a user simply wants a work assistant, they may lean towards a more concise and professional tone. Users can also get creative with exactly how precise they want their instructions to be, she said, such as configuring the model to use “highly specific communication styles” for writing, coding, or learning, or getting it to replicate exactly how they themselves act. “What stands out most to me is less the novelty itself and more how personal these preferences can be,” Romaniuk told The Deep View. “People often want the model to adapt to the way they think, learn, or communicate.”
Romaniuk noted that adjusting ChatGPT’s personality doesn’t create a different system for each user. At its foundation, the model is the same for everyone. And by default, Romaniuk said that the goal is to offer an experience that’s “broadly useful and adaptable,” providing a model that’s palatable to as many people as possible.
However, there is no “single perfect personality,” she said. Because everyone reacts differently to the way that the chatbot responds, “What feels concise and efficient to one person can feel cold or robotic to someone else,” she said. Small wording changes, for example, can elicit strong user reactions.
The challenge is that the OpenAI team has to walk a fine line between warmth and clarity, without making the model sound overly deferential, verbose, or unnatural.
In the future, ChatGPT’s personalization features will become more intuitive, she said. The goal is for people to eventually need to do little to configure the chatbot into their ideal conversation partner, making it more “naturally adaptive” while keeping transparency and user control at the forefront.
“The goal is to build AI that feels genuinely helpful without compromising reliability, trustworthiness, or user agency,” Romaniuk added.
Our Deeper View #
Personality can play a significant role in the ways we interact with chatbots. It's why people flock to platforms like Character.ai to get the personality they choose to interact with. OpenAI itself received backlash for retiring GPT 4o, with many users expressing that they preferred the warm tone of that model. But chatbots’ personalities can also have an impact on users themselves, sometimes in dangerous ways. OpenAI has said in its Model Spec that its goal is to allow users the freedom to create with AI while keeping guardrails up to “reduce the risk of real harm.” And while OpenAI may do everything within its power to prevent the worst from happening, the safest safeguards might be beyond the scope of any one company. Rather, the solution may be a combination of regulation and education.