It's useful for ideation: suggesting ideas and concepts that you might not think of. A bit like a conceptual thesaurus. But it doesn't replace the hard work of thinking for yourself.

In the same way it can detour your thoughts to the mainstream and lead you away from a line of thought that might have ended up somewhere else.

Here are two examples:

a) No / little data: Whenever you are starting to think about a subject, you can ask it to give you a structure / categories.

b) Existing data: What I do very often is to give it a lot of "raw data" like unstructured thoughts or an unstructured article, then I ask him to find suitable top categories.

a) Doesn't that mean to limit oneself to bias, mediocrity, and preconceived judgements instead of actually thinking?

Well it helps me to get started. Not more but also not less.

For me it’s very important to emphasize that AI is a tool. You have to use it responsibly. But there is no reason not to use it.

I see, I don't want to shame this kind of use. It's kind of almost like talking about something briefly with an educated person.

Until it's not.

I'm not the type who'd say "don't use AI". Use whatever works. Myself I became really fascinated by transformer LLMs / GPTs in winter 2019, then again when ChatGPT was published and a good few months after that.

It's just that my interest&enthusiasm has almosted vanished by now. Surely it will reemerge at some point.