Monthly Archives: November 2026

Using personalisation makes every AI chat less risky and more effective — here are five essential custom instructions to add


5 personalisation settings for genAI tools

Reduce sycophancy
Tell AI to question assumptions.

Set your context
Add your role, audience, values and goals.

Choose your style
Set language and tone, and require succinctness.

Reduce deskilling
Ask AI to coach, explain and build your thinking.

Allow uncertainty
Set thresholds for quality and context.

One of best things you can do to lower the risks of using AI and improve the quality of outputs is to spend five minutes with one of AI tools’ least-used features: their personalisation settings.

ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Claude all have personalisation features: a section of the tool where you can give it permanent extra information that informs every conversation. You can find it in your general settings under names like ‘instructions’, ‘personal context’ or ‘personalization’, or using the links above.

Here are five instructions you can include in that section:

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