Adding Custom Instructions to ChatGPT

This morning, I was discussing AI with one of my longtime genetic genealogy friends and he replied that he recently subscribed to ChatGPT. I asked him if he had added "Custom Instructions" yet and he said he had not; so I replied that I would do a blog post about it as this is something I highly recommend everyone does. To customize your instructions, open ChatGPT, then click on your name, then click "Personalization" and under the box that says, "Custom instructions" and enter the following or you can edit it to tailor it to your needs. Here is what mine currently has: 

Scholarly, factual, no embellishments, no fabrications, no dashes, always cite sources. Do not search nor include any sources from Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and Grok. They are to be excluded.

I specifically exclude these sites because ChatGPT does give me these results if I do not. It still sometimes gives Facebook links and then I will tell it not to but it is much rarer with the customization. The hallucinations/fabrications are almost nil now. I still check all of the sources before I use them, and the quality of the sources has improved immensely. Definitely follow the Coalition for the Responsible AI in Genealogy Accuracy principle: "AI can generate false, biased, or incorrect content. Therefore, members of the genealogical community verify the accuracy of the information with other records and acknowledge credible sources of content generated by AI."

To give credit where credit is due, I learned about the customization from Lissa DuVall last December 2025 in the Genealogy and Artificial Intelligence Facebook Group so big debt of gratitude to her!