Persona
A persona is a defined character a model maintains across a conversation, covering how it speaks, what it knows, and what it will not do.
A persona is more than a role: it includes voice, boundaries, and consistency over turns. Effective personas state what the character refuses as clearly as what it does, since drift usually shows up first as the character breaking frame to be helpful.
Related terms
- Role prompting
- Role prompting is telling a model to adopt a specific persona or professional perspective so that its vocabulary, priorities, and level of detail match that role.
- System prompt
- A system prompt is a persistent instruction that sets a model’s role, rules, and boundaries for an entire conversation, separate from the individual messages a user sends.
More on techniques
See the full glossary, read the guides, or put it into practice in the prompt builder.