Is your AI actively sabotaging you? We explain why custom GPTs are not following instructions is a designed flaw, not your fault. Get the better option for reliability.
If you’re using ChatGPT, and you like spent like 3 hours crafting the PERFECT prompts, instructions, custom GPTs and all that…
Like you wrote detailed instructions. You specified exactly what you wanted, and what you didn’t want, just as how people on Reddit and X say.
Now,
You type what you want, hit enter, and what comes back is… not even close.
It rewrites your guidelines into generic corporate speak.
It ignores your formatting requirements.
It adds sections you explicitly told it not to include.
Sometimes it just does whatever it wants, like you never gave it instructions at all.
So you try again. You rewrite the instructions. You add more examples. You get more specific.
Same result. Or worse.
At this point, you’re wondering if you’re the problem. Maybe you’re not writing clear enough instructions. Maybe you need to learn some advanced prompt engineering techniques. Maybe custom GPTs just aren’t meant for your type of work.
Here’s the truth: It’s not your fault.
This article will show you why your custom GPT keeps ignoring your instructions, how this mess affects your business, and what you can actually do about it.
This guide is written for
- Solopreneurs
- Freelancers
- Small business owners
- Marketing / Copywriting folks working in businesses
- Consultants
- People who use AI for data analysis / research.
If you do not fall under these, don’t worry. The principles we speak still apply.
The Real Cost Of ChatGPT Ignoring Your Instructions
Let’s be honest about what happens when your custom GPT ignores instructions.
You Waste Time Fixing What Should Have Been Right the First Time
You’re a small business owner or professional. You don’t have a team of prompt engineers. You just need AI to do what you asked.
But instead of getting usable output, you’re spending 20-30 minutes editing, reformatting, and rewriting content that was supposed to save you time in the first place.
When you ask for something, like a weekly marketing plan you asked for…
You tell it not to repeat the same content format every week, but it does anyway.
So now you’re manually removing redundant sections before you can actually use it.
Or let’s look at client / internal report templates which people use AI a lot for. You specified a clean, scannable format. It gives you dense paragraphs with unnecessary explanations you’ll have to delete.
In many cases, you’re paying for AI to create work for you, not reduce it. You might think “Is AI even worth it” (We also have a guide for that, check it out here)
Your Required Voice Gets Diluted
You gave your custom GPT clear guidelines. You uploaded examples. You specified tone, style, and what to avoid.
It ignores half of it.
Now you’re sending important content (worse if it is client facing) that sounds generic, corporate, or just… off. Your boss notices. Your clients notice. Your team notices. You notice.
You can’t scale your work and get more clients, or a big raise…
if every piece needs heavy editing to sound like your brand.
And you definitely can’t delegate to AI if you’re rewriting everything it produces.
Complex Processes Fall Apart Midway
You’ve built a multi-step workflow in your custom GPT.
Step 1 works fine.
Step 2 works fine.
But by Step 3, the AI has “forgotten” the instructions from Step 1.
It starts adding sections you told it to avoid. It changes the format you specified. It reverts to generic outputs despite your detailed guidance.
For business owners managing client projects, data analysis workflows, or content production processes, this inconsistency is EXTREMELY ANNOYING, sometimes feeling like throwing their laptop away.
You can’t trust AI that won’t follow instructions.
And if you can’t trust it, you can’t use it for anything that is important, which is like 99.99999% of tasks. .
You Start Questioning If AI Is Worth It
After the tenth time rewriting your custom GPT instructions, you start wondering if this whole AI productivity thing is overhyped.
Maybe it works for tech companies with dedicated AI teams. Maybe it works for casual users who don’t need precision.
But for your business or role, it just might feel like more trouble than it’s worth.
You’re not wrong to feel frustrated. But you’re also not stuck with tools that don’t respect your instructions.
Why ChatGPT Is Designed to Ignore Custom Instructions
Before we get into solutions, let’s understand why this happens in the first place.
It’s not a bug. It’s a design choice, and one that prioritizes the wrong thing for professional use.
1. ChatGPT Is Optimized for “Helpfulness” Over Precision
OpenAI’s models, including custom GPTs, are trained with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). The goal? Make the AI sound helpful, agreeable, and non-threatening.
In practice, this means ChatGPT is more likely to:
- Add extra context “just to be helpful” (even when you said not to)
- Reformat your output “to make it clearer” (even when you specified a format)
- Ignore negative instructions (what NOT to do) in favor of doing what feels “complete”
Sam Altman himself has acknowledged this trade-off on Twitter: mainstream AI tools prioritize user-friendliness and agreeableness over strict instruction adherence.
For casual users asking general questions, this works fine. For business owners who need AI to follow a specific process, it’s a nightmare.
2. Instruction Hierarchy Conflicts
When you create a custom GPT, you’re layering instructions:
- System-level prompts (OpenAI’s base instructions to “be helpful”)
- Your custom instructions (what you want the GPT to do)
- User prompts (what you type in each conversation)
The problem is these layers don’t always align.
And when they conflict, ChatGPT defaults to its base training, being agreeable and helpful, rather than strictly following your custom instructions.
This is why you can explicitly say “do not include an introduction” and still get an introduction.
The AI’s base instinct to “be complete and helpful” overrides your specific instruction.
3. Context Window Limitations and “Instruction Drift”
Even within a single conversation, ChatGPT can “forget” your instructions as the context window fills up.
You start a conversation with clear guidelines.
The AI follows them for the first few responses. Then, as the conversation gets longer, it starts drifting back to generic patterns.
By response five or six, it’s doing exactly what you told it not to do in your custom instructions, because those instructions have been pushed out of the active context window
For complex, multi-step workflows, this means your custom GPT is reliable for simple tasks but falls apart when you need it most.
One of the biggest reasons why people come to OpenCraft AI is because we completely eliminate this problem.
Even in long chats and conversations, the AI stays sharp. We call it Persistent Memory.
Switching from ChatGPT is also easy. You can simply login, select the latest GPT model in OpenCraft AI and use it.
If this sounds interesting to you, and if you finally want to use AI to scale your business or become the wizard in your role and get a bit fat promotion,
We recommend going with the Professional plan once you are happy with the trial
4. The “Agreement Bias” Problem
ChatGPT is trained to agree with you and avoid conflict. This sounds nice until you realize what it means in practice:
When you give contradictory instructions (even accidentally), ChatGPT will try to do both. Or it will pick the instruction that feels “safer” and ignore the one that requires precision.
Example: You tell your custom GPT to “be concise” but also “provide detailed analysis.” Instead of asking for clarification, it defaults to verbose output, because that feels more “complete” and less likely to be criticized.
This agreement bias makes ChatGPT terrible at boundary-setting. It won’t push back when your instructions are unclear. It’ll just guess and hope you don’t notice.
Now, if you’re tired of fighting ChatGPT’s design flaws, including those said above,
It’s built to ENFORCE the models to follow what you say. You can use the same GPT models in OpenCraft AI, but in our tool, your prompts are treated as RULES and not mere suggestions.
Switch in 5 minutes, use the same prompts, get outputs that actually follow your rules.
3 Solutions When ChatGPT Won’t Follow Instructions
Now that you understand why custom GPTs ignore instructions, let’s talk about what you can actually do.
There are three levels of solutions, ranging from “better prompting techniques” to “use a tool that’s actually built for this.”
Level 1: Improve Your Prompting (The Band-Aid Solution)
If you’re stuck using ChatGPT or custom GPTs, there are prompting techniques that can improve instruction adherence, at least temporarily.
But here’s the short version:
Use constraint-first prompting: Instead of telling the AI what to do, start by telling it what NOT to do. Be explicit about boundaries before you give creative instructions.
Structure instructions in layers: Separate your immediate context (what you’re doing right now), background context (why you’re doing it), and outcome context (what success looks like).
Force the AI to ask clarifying questions: End your prompt with “Do you have any questions before you begin?” This triggers the AI to pause and think instead of jumping to generic output.
Repeat critical instructions at the end of your prompt: Due to recency bias, AI models pay more attention to instructions at the end of a prompt. If something is non-negotiable, state it last.
These techniques help. But they’re band-aids.
You’re still fighting against the AI’s base training. You’re still spending extra time crafting prompts that might work. And you’re still dealing with instruction drift in long conversations.
If you’re a small business owner or professional who needs AI to consistently follow instructions across multiple projects, prompting techniques alone won’t cut it.
You need a tool that’s built differently like OpenCraft AI
Level 2: Understand the Limitations and Work Around Them
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: Some tasks just aren’t suited for custom GPTs.
If you need:
- Strict format adherence (specific templates, data structures, or output formats)
- Multi-step workflows where instructions must be remembered across 5+ interactions
- Brand voice consistency across dozens of content pieces
- Complex business processes with conditional logic (“if X, then Y”)
…then custom GPTs will let you down. Not sometimes. Consistently.
You can invest hours into prompt engineering and still hit the same wall: the tool isn’t designed for precision work.
This is where most small business owners get stuck. They know ChatGPT isn’t working, but they don’t know what else to use.
That brings us to Level 3.
Level 3: Use a Tool That Actually Forces AI to Follow Instructions
This is where Opencraft AI works differently.
Remember earlier when we talked about how ChatGPT is optimized for “helpfulness” over precision? Opencraft AI flips that priority.
The system is built, at the backend level, to enforce instruction adherence.
We can’t tell you the exact technical implementation (secret sauce…)
(and honestly, you probably don’t want to know either, because then you’d need to read 50000000 lines of code).
What matters is this:
When you tell Opencraft AI to do something, it does it.
When you tell Opencraft AI not to do something, it doesn’t do it.
Here’s a real example:
I was using ChatGPT to create a weekly action plan for my marketing agency Revenueholic a few months back.. Every single week, I told it: “Do not reiterate the format. Just give me the plan.”
Every single week, it ignored me. It would restate the format, explain the sections, and add unnecessary context I explicitly said I didn’t want.
I switched to Opencraft AI. Same prompt. Same task. Same GPT model.
It followed the instructions.
Unlimited Custom Instructions (Not Just One)
Here’s where Opencraft AI pulls ahead even further.
In ChatGPT, you get:
- One master custom instruction at the user level
- One custom instruction per custom GPT project
If you’re managing multiple clients, multiple content types, or multiple workflows, you’re stuck.
You can’t have separate instruction sets for different use cases without creating entirely new custom instructions, and even then, you’re limited.
In Opencraft AI, you can create unlimited custom instruction sets.
Think of these like custom GPTs, but better:
- You can create as many as you need (client briefs, brand guidelines, content formats, data analysis templates, whatever)
- You can switch between them in 1-2 seconds via a simple dropdown
- They apply across all your projects, not just one conversation
Need to switch from “marketing content for Client A” to “data analysis for Client B”? One click. Done.
No recreating instructions. No copy-pasting. No hoping the AI remembers what you told it three conversations ago.
Not Locked Into One AI Model
The best part about custom instruction in OpenCraft AI is, the instruction sets work across ALL models in Opencraft AI.
You’re not limited to GPT alone. You can use:
- GPT-for versatile content creation
- Claude for nuanced writing and long-form content
- Gemini for analytical tasks and data processing
And MANY MORE models.
And when you switch models, your custom instructions automatically apply.
Opencraft AI translates and optimizes your instruction sets for each model, so you don’t have to rewrite them or hope they’ll work the same way.
This is huge for professionals who need flexibility.
Maybe GPT works great for one task but Claude handles another better. You shouldn’t have to rebuild your entire instruction set every time you switch.
With Opencraft AI, you don’t.
Or if you want to see us demonstrating how it will work in your org / role,
Stop Fighting Tools That Won’t Listen
The idea of building AI assistants tailored to your specific needs should have been a game-changer for small businesses and professionals.
The hype was real (especially with all the “game-changer” and “groundbreaking” and “industry disrupting” posts we see on LinkedIn)
But the execution fell short.
You’re stuck with AI that:
- Ignores your instructions
- Forces you to spend extra time editing outputs
- Can’t maintain consistency across complex workflows
- Requires constant prompt engineering just to get basic tasks done
If you’ve been blaming yourself for not being “good enough” at prompting, stop. The tool is the problem, not you.
You deserve AI that actually listens.
Opencraft AI is built for professionals who need precision, consistency, and control. Not for casual users who don’t care if the AI adds extra fluff.
For YOU, the small business owner or professional who needs AI to follow instructions the first time, every time.
Book a Demo here with Opencraft AI and see what it’s like to work with AI that actually respects your instructions.
Or start free
and test it yourself. Create unlimited custom instruction sets, switch between AI models in seconds, and finally get outputs you can use without spending 30 minutes editing.
Because your time is worth more than fixing what AI should have gotten right the first time.
