Answering your questions about business and technology
Someone mentioned a system prompt the other day and I don’t know what that is. Can you help me?
~ Sue
Hi Sue,
I will assume that you are using a chatbot - like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, etc. If you are, then the system prompt is a set of instructions that shapes everything that the model says.
It’s kind of like a job description, but one that will always be followed.
For example, if your system prompt was “You are a patient teacher who explains things clearly. Your students are 10 years old.” you would get very different responses than if your prompt was “You are a scientific researcher who always provides precise, technical, and detailed explanations at the PhD level”.
One thing that you might notice is that those examples are very similar to persona prompts (i.e., “act as Albert Einstein”, “you are a project manager”, etc.). A really important difference is that, if you are using a chatbot, you won’t be able to see or change the system prompt. It is usually hidden from the user.
Most of the popular chatbots have a system prompt that includes “You are a helpful assistant…” That is why when you put in a persona prompt, it will still work (because following the prompt would be considered “helpful”.
Anthropic is the major AI chatbot company that makes their system prompts available. If you want to see what some of them look like, here is the link - Anthropic system prompts
One thing worth noting, I opened with assuming that you are using a chatbot. If that is not the case and you are accessing LLMs through an API connection (or want to), you can set the system prompt to whatever you want. This is one of the many reasons why people choose not to use chatbots once they get to a certain comfort level with AI tools, but that is a different post…
Hope that helps
~ Damien