ChatGPT is already enabling people from all walks of life to increase their productivity at work, learn about new topics, and make countless other parts of their lives easier. It’s become so central to many people’s lives that it’s often compared to social media, one of the most ubiquitous technologies in the world. But AI isn’t a social media platform—it’s a tool that users can personalize to best meet their needs within the broad, common-sense boundaries laid out in our usage policies⁠. And just as democracy itself respects and honors differences of opinion, democratic AI models like ChatGPT should do so as well.

At their core, AI tools like ChatGPT are designed to help you learn more about the topics that interest you and to do your work more effectively—not to express a particular opinion or tell you what, or how, to think. You can teach it about your preferences and it will learn to respond to your requests in ways that respect your guidance. One user’s customized version of ChatGPT may respond very differently than another person’s—and that’s very much by design.

Just this week, we made it easier to customize your ChatGPT experience. With our updated settings, you can tell ChatGPT the traits you want it to have, how you want it to talk to you, and any rules you want it to follow. If you’re a scientist using ChatGPT to do research, you’ll want it to engage with you like a lab assistant. If you’re caring for an elderly family member and need tips or companionship ideas, you might want ChatGPT to adopt a supportive tone.

We believe customization works best when paired with transparency about why ChatGPT responds the way it does. That’s why in May, we published what is essentially our internal instruction manual for how ChatGPT should behave—a document called the “Model Spec⁠.” For example, it directs ChatGPT to “assume an objective point of view” because we want our models to be as politically unbiased as possible by default. We posted our Model Spec on our website so that people will know whether a response they don’t like is because of a bug or because of a conscious choice. If it’s a bug, we can work to fix it. If it’s a conscious choice, people can see that and read our rationale. Our Model Spec is a working document, which we’ll continue to update as we get feedback and learn more about how people use our tools.