ChatGPT can be a personal and professional advisor (with reasonable limits), but it doesn’t always give you advice the way you like. 

We’re all drawn to different types of mentors and experts, and we each have our communication preferences. It comes down to our personalities and proclivities.

I appreciate honest and candid communication delivered kindly. I’m also super sensitive, and I love words of affirmation. But I find that when I talk to ChatGPT, I have to preface my prompts with the directive to “cut the fluff and give it to me straight.” I don’t want a chatbot pretending to be a friend. That’s tricky psychological territory. 

As a reminder, here’s how to think about chatbots and safety. This is a good guide on how to use ChatGPT and hacks to get the best answers. I covered tips such as giving it a role, asking it to play devil’s advocate and using trigger words. AI models are always evolving, so pay attention to new features in updates. 

While all the focus is on the prompting, the personalization settings in ChatGPT are where you can influence the outputs. Let me show you how. 

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, filed a lawsuit in 2025 against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Personalize your ChatGPT experience

A personality is the style and tone ChatGPT uses when responding. It doesn’t change what ChatGPT can do, just how it talks to you. The current model comes with seven personalities in addition to the default: professional, friendly, candid, quirky, efficient, nerdy and cynical. These features were rolled out in November 2025 and are available on the free plan. 

Here’s how to adjust ChatGPT’s personality: 

• Open ChatGPT and go to Settings.
• Click on Personalization.
• Choose your base style, tone and characteristics.

From here, you can also customize formatting for ChatGPT’s responses across things like headings, lists and emoji. Extra instructions could include: 

• “Keep this to three bullets.”
• “Give me the answer first, then details.” 
• “No emojis.” 
• “Add a checklist.” 

If you want, you can add a preferred nickname (I wouldn’t advise this, because ChatGPT isn’t your friend), your occupation and anything you want the model to know about you. 

Insider tips from OpenAI

I had the chance to speak with OpenAI’s Edie Campbell-Urban, who works on the communications team for ChatGPT. She shared the following insider tips: 

I never thought to adjust settings based on my search intention. It makes sense, because I’d prefer a professional tone for work-related queries and a more candid and direct tone for fertility conversations. 

How does ChatGPT’s personality change things?

As an example, here are two different answers to the same question using different settings: 

Discussing further testing and next steps after an early pregnancy loss

Friendly personality response: Although this was the friendly setting, it read the room (probably referring to past requests I’ve made about it being candid) and wasn’t too over the top. This was the language it used.

Cynical personality response: I chose cynical and also toggled the Warm and Enthusiastic settings to Less:

I then asked the same question. Here’s how it responded:

I liked how it was very matter-of-fact. 

These settings are really important to know about, because ChatGPT’s answers can skew your thinking on a topic. Keep this in mind as you’re interacting with AI, as confirmation bias is always a concern.