Welcome to The AI Brief.

Every week, you get clear, honest breakdown of what’s really happening in AI. No recycled press releases pretending to be insight. Just the developments that actually matter.

Yesterday was about which AI to use. Today is about the setting inside the one you are already using that most people have never touched.

Every time you open a new ChatGPT conversation, you start from zero. ChatGPT does not know who you are, what you do, how you like information presented, or what you want it to stop doing. Most people deal with this by re-explaining their context at the start of every chat, or by skipping the explanation and getting responses that feel slightly off.

There is a setting that fixes this permanently. Most people have never opened it.

Late last year, a Klimt sold for the highest price ever paid for modern art at auction.

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So, that's where it gets interesting.

Each environment is unique, but after dot-com, post war and contemporary art grew about 24% annually for a decade. After 2008, about 11% for 12 years.

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The setting is called Custom Instructions. Find it by clicking your profile picture in the bottom left of ChatGPT's desktop interface, then clicking Customize ChatGPT.

Two text fields appear. The first asks what ChatGPT should know about you. The second asks how you want it to respond.

Both fields are empty for the majority of ChatGPT users. That is the entire problem.

The first field is where you tell ChatGPT who you are. Not a biography. The specific information that changes the quality of responses for your use case. Your job and what it actually involves. Your level of experience in the areas you ask about most. The context you would normally copy and paste into a new conversation.

A good example for a marketing professional: "I'm a marketing manager at a B2B SaaS company. I work primarily on blog posts, email sequences, and LinkedIn content. My audience is mid-level decision makers at companies with 50 to 500 employees. I have ten years of marketing experience so I do not need basic explanations of standard concepts."

The second field is where you tell ChatGPT how to behave. This one changes the most about how responses feel day to day. You can tell it to skip the opening affirmations, cut the summaries at the end, avoid bullet points unless you ask, always include code examples for technical questions, match a specific tone, and stop using phrases you hate.

A good example: "Be direct. Do not restate my question before answering. No bullet points unless I specifically ask for them. Short paragraphs. If you are uncertain, say so rather than hedging. Do not start responses with 'Great question' or anything similar."

Both fields apply to every conversation from that point forward. You do not explain yourself again. ChatGPT reads these at the start of every session.

The people who have filled these in honestly describe the experience as ChatGPT finally feeling like it was configured for them rather than for everyone at once. That is exactly what it is. A setup step that most users skip because nobody in the onboarding flow pointed them there.

Custom Instructions and Memory are different things. Memory stores facts ChatGPT picks up automatically from your conversations over time. Custom Instructions are rules you set deliberately and that apply immediately. Both are worth having. But Custom Instructions matter more to set first, because they shape every response from the moment you save them, while Memory builds inconsistently and is harder to control.

Custom Instructions exist specifically to eliminate that friction. They take five minutes to fill in properly and they change the quality of every conversation after that, permanently.

The setting has been available since 2023. Most users have been ignoring it the whole time, not because they chose to, but because the onboarding flow never showed them it was there. That is a choice OpenAI made, and the people who found the setting anyway are getting a noticeably better product than everyone else.

Most marketers use ChatGPT to do general research and then call it an AI strategy. The ones outperforming them are deploying specialized agents built for specific jobs.

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Go to ChatGPT right now, click your profile picture, and click Customize ChatGPT. Spend five minutes filling in both fields honestly. You will notice the difference in your next conversation.

Tomorrow: The one free AI tool that beats the paid version most people are using. No subscription needed.