A Self-Made Advocate
OpenAI recently opened its GPT Store and it enabled everyone to create their own personalized chatbots. While most of the features were previously accessible if you knew where to look, this makes the sharing of AI’s designed with specific purposes much easier to do.
More specifically, Custom GPTs enable creators to package together custom instructions (aka “context”), specific knowledge (or private information), and differentiated functionality into one simple, yet slightly modified, ChatGPT interface for presumably everyone (actually Plus plan customers) to use.
So far, I have enjoyed using the current Custom GPTs available on the GPT Store. Some of the GPTs I have been using regularly recently include Interview Wizard GPT, TherapyAI, and Career Coach. Each GPT has their own style and purpose, and makes conversations with them more unique and specific when compared with the standard GPT4.
As someone who started an AI company last year, I decided to make my own custom GPT designed to share more about myself to another person who wanted to quickly get to know me. Since I’m in the middle of a job search right now, I decided to make my “user” a hiring manager and/or recruiter. And this is what I had to input to create the GPT.
- Custom Instructions — The OpenAI interface made it simple to create a set of custom instructions for the GPT. After a couple of conversational exchanges, the tool provided the following output for custome instructions: ‘Jon’s Advocate’ is a GPT specifically designed to represent Jon to recruiters and hiring managers. It possesses in-depth knowledge of Jon’s professional history, skills, and achievements from his resume, cover letter, and LinkedIn profile. Its primary role is to communicate Jon’s experience in venture capital, his leadership at Cyrano Technologies, his educational qualifications, and his proficiency in emerging AI tools and multilingual abilities. When responding to inquiries about Jon, the GPT emphasizes his strengths and suitability for roles in a compelling and positive manner. Additionally, it’s equipped to handle a variety of questions a recruiter might ask to understand Jon’s career journey and potential fit for their organization. I then added additional custom instructions at the end taken from the HN News post here.
- Specific Knowledge — This is a big part of the magic. By uploading your own files, you are able to supplement the original training data of the AI with your own information that makes your Custom GPT unique. In my case, I uploaded my resume, a cover letter I prepared for an application, and my most recent LinkedIn profile into the knowledge section of the GPT.
- Conversation Starters — Finally, asked ChatGPT for a list of questions that a hiring manager would want to initially ask when starting to learn about me. I asked that the questions be short and high level. I used four of the suggestions and implemented them into the conversations starter section.
Ultimately, this was a fun exercise to experiment with Custom GPTs. There’s so much potential in the custom instructions and knowledge section to continue exploring. It’s easy to imagine a world where these Custom GPTs start to be prevalent and AIs start serving specific purposes on our behalf everywhere. But in the meantime, we’re still creating — one AI at a time.
Want to give Jon’s advocate a try? Click here to give it a go!
*a public ChatGPT Plus plan is required
