šŸ¤– 5 Ways I’m *Really* Using ChatGPT (And How to Stay Out of the ChatGPT Dunning-Kruger Club)

Clark Boyd
6 min readJan 12

Did you know that over 350 griffon vultures have died in Spain in the last decade because they flew into wind turbines?

Vultures are one of the very few species on our planet with better eyesight than humans. And yet, they fly into those giant white monstrosities.

Why?

Well, they just aren’t looking for them. They’re looking to the side and down, not straight ahead.

Ah, but why am I mentioning this?

Am I trying to make some grand point about blind spots?

Maybe it’s a tortured parable about how we miss what’s right in front of us?

No. It will be, when someone pays me to make a McKinsey-style trends deck.

Actually, I was wearing my giant puffer jacket earlier with the hood all stitched up like Kenny from South Park, and my restricted vision made me think I was like a reverse vulture. I could only see what was directly in front of me.

I note these things down.

One day, when I get my call to create the trends deck to end all trends decks, I’ll be ready.

This time in hi, tech.:

  • A little discussion about the role of ChatGPT in education, and why I’m increasingly inclined to agree that we should be cautious.
  • Despite these limitations, GPT-based language models still have powerful uses if we incorporate them into our existing practices.
  • Some potential uses of ChatGPT include:

Summarising text

Generating code

Suggesting new ideas for content

Reformatting content

Examining arguments

I’ll show you how I’ve been using it to do precisely these things!

You may have seen that the New York City Department of Education has banned access to ChatGPT for students.

In all honesty, my gut reaction to that announcement was that we shouldn’t try to restrict change and we should instead rethink how we learn.

I almost asked ChatGPT to brainstorm some LinkedIn posts for me and all.

Clark Boyd

Tech/business writer, lecturer (Columbia), and data analyst. >500k views on Medium. I used to be with it, but then they changed what ā€˜it’ was.