Going down the rabbit hole with ChatGPT Custom Instructions

(2 Min Read) Tuning ChatGPT to help me with my research.

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Often, I become obsessed with a new topic. I google it and get an answer. Because my current understanding of the topic is naïve, my questions only scratch the surface.

As I learn something more insightful about the topic and want to explore it further, my questions start to become specific, and that’s where I start my descent down the rabbit hole.

Having gone down rabbit holes enough times, I know that the quality of my research and the depth of my knowledge are directly related to the types of questions I ask at each step.

With a decade of practice, I’ve gotten decently good with the questions I ask now if I say so myself. That was not the case at the beginning and is the reason why I feel many people don’t go deep enough on the topic. It’s hard to come up with the right questions to ask.

In the beginning, the process looked like the following.

I started with a question and googled for an answer. Then, I formulate the following question(s) and google them in new tabs. After hours and sometimes days later, I’d find myself 100 tabs opened and several levels down the rabbit hole.

The key to going down the rabbit hole successfully is to ask the right set of follow-up questions. Question quality determines if you find a dead-end in your research or uncover something unique.

So when Google launched the “People also ask” feature in their search, I was pretty excited.

That feature gives me the next set of questions to ask without asking. YAY!!!

To me, this feature is a delight, and if the Product Manager/Engineer at Google who built this wants to reach out, please do; the dinner is on me.

Now, you may be wondering where AI fits into all of this. “Custom Instructions”

In my ChatGPT custom instructions, I have instructed ChatGPT to “Give me 2-4 follow-up questions that I can ask on the topic” (⬅️ copy-paste that into your prompt ). And the results are marvelous.

Now, I always have good follow-up questions to ask.

There are times when I google a question from the ChatGPT prompt. I see that pattern breaking with Bing Integration.

Anyways, if you’ve read till here, I believe you may also like going down the rabbit hole and hope custom instructions may help you. As I said in my other posts, AI is here to change things and, hopefully for the better.

On a side note, here is my video feedback for the Brave Leo AI browser plugin on a similar topic where suggestive questions can help explore a whole new can of worms 🐛 😉

Reviewing Brave Leo AI Feature - Watch Video