System prompt

A fixed set of instructions that shapes how an AI model behaves before the user types anything. It sets the role, the rules, the tone, and often the safety limits the model should follow in every conversation. Two organizations using the same underlying model can get very different behavior because their system prompts differ. For people accountable for a deployed tool this matters: a lot of what makes a healthcare AI product safe or unsafe is decided in the system prompt and the guardrails, not in the model itself, so it is fair to ask to see it.

Terms like this come up in real clinical scenarios across the HelloAI courses: bite-sized modules with verifiable certificates. An account takes one minute, no password needed.