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.
The useful part of a role is the expertise it implies, not the theatre. "You are a copy editor who cuts redundancy" changes behaviour; "You are a world-class genius writer" mostly does not, because it names no concrete standard the model can apply.
Related terms
- 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.
- 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.
More on techniques
See the full glossary, read the guides, or put it into practice in the prompt builder.