On Sat 13 Jun 2026 at 3 pm, I conducted an online workshop on Data Stories with AI.

Registration link: https://forms.gle/dNkUxtJ2PVqNMNcE9

In this workshop, the audience used ChatGPT and Claude, mostly, to:

  • Find data
  • Analyze it
  • Extract insights
  • Visualize as stories

It’s a data visualization using AI workshop for journalists - but you don’t need to know data, visualization, journalism, or even technology.

But this is a practical workshop. You’ll be doing stuff and sharing your results.

Pre-requisites: A paid ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro account - both are about Rs 2,000. Just buy it for a month. It’s worth it.

It’s on Google Meet: https://meet.google.com/qzt-obnb-cgp.

Here are the takeaways from the workshop:

  1. Delegate the prompt, not just the task. Don’t write the brief — hand the model your examples and ask, “What prompt should I give you to do this?” Meta-prompting is laziness turned into method.
  2. Treat “stuck” as a prompt. Write down exactly where you’re stuck and paste it in. You either get unstuck, or you get stuck on something new. You never stay stuck — the bottleneck keeps shifting.
  3. Never let the model do arithmetic in its head. Say “write and run a program to do X.” It can’t reliably multiply nine-digit numbers, but it can write code that checks a million possibilities exactly. Arithmetic as a tool, not as memory.
  4. Low-cost experiments are free insight. “Blow my mind with insights nobody would know” costs nothing. If it’s good, bonus. If it’s wrong, you lose nothing. Start with what’s easy, learn what works, then scale.
  5. “Check what is missing,” not “is this correct?” Asking a model to confirm makes it lazy. Asking it to find errors — “the more errors you find, the better” — makes it useful.
  6. New topic, new chat. Models have no memory; they replay the whole conversation each time. A two-hour thread asked to “do X” is a confused assistant. Stuck in a loop? New chat, new model, new provider.
  7. Ask for a single-page HTML file. It’s the most shareable, chart-capable output. For impact, also try “create an image” — comics, infographics and sketchnotes are now serious analytical formats.
  8. Feedback is the new main event. Generation and verification are cheap, so spend your effort on iteration. A reader’s one-line objection — or an AI pretending to be the audience — becomes a revision in seconds.
  9. Beware the false positive. “Vanishing water” can mean a lake being cleaned; “less vegetation” can be removed algae. Let the model research the cause — and give it the power to say “no story here.”
  10. Pay for one month, then judge. ₹2,000 of Plus, used hard for 30 days, is the highest-ROI tech subscription there is. Re-evaluate every six months — never longer — because everything is accelerating.