Martin Wattenberg

@wattenberg.bsky.social

7962 Followers 1217 Following

Human/AI interaction. ML interpretability. Visualization as design, science, art. Professor at Harvard, and part-time at Google DeepMind.

Colorful depictions of reasoning progress: most of the time the system settles on the correct answer but sometimes it vacillates in interesting ways.
The Wikipedia intro to the Weierstrass P function, calling the letterform that people use "a uniquely fancy script p"
The ratio of mentions of "duck tape" to either "duck tape" or "duct tape" over time, via Google Books. It started at 100% but is negligible today.
Paragraph from a 1954 Ninth Circuit case on copyright, ruling that the character of Sam Spade of the Maltese Falcon could not be copyrighted. The full text: It is conceivable that the character really constitutes the story being told, but if the character is only the chessman in the game of telling the story he is not within the area of the protection afforded by the copyright. The subject is given consideration in the Nichols case, supra, 45 F.2d at page 121 of the citation. At page 122 of 45 F.2d of the same case the court remarks that the line between infringement and non-infringement is indefinite and may seem arbitrary when drawn; nevertheless it must be drawn. Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp., 2 Cir., 1930, 45 F.2d 119. See Warner Bros. Pictures v. Majestic Pictures Corp., 2 Cir., 70 F.2d 310, 311.
This is the prompt I used, for both ChatGPT and Claude, telling it to answer in Morse code only. At the end of the prompt is the Morse code question about Groundhog day. Finally, you can see its Morse code response, which I then plugged into a separate online translator.
An elegantly laid out word cloud
A piece of the original Reddit thread: a person uses ChatGPT to create an "all knowing and ever present mom"
Claude sees that I am right, after looking at the results of the debugged test. Vindication! Claude is gracious in defeat.
Claude decides to write a test to see who is right. The first test has a bug which causes an error to appear in the console.
Claude says the % operator in Javascript gets significantly slower with large numbers. I react skeptically.
QUOTE: I spoke with people who told me of feeling “let down” when they had cracked the code and lost the illusion of mystery. I often saw people trying to protect their relationships with ELIZA by avoiding situations that would provoke the program into making a predictable response. They didn’t ask questions that they knew would “confuse” the program, that would make it “talk nonsense.” And they went out of their way to ask questions in a form that they believed would provoke a lifelike response. People wanted to maintain the illusion that ELIZA was able to respond to them
A long quote describing how, if you play with ELIZA for any length of time, the illusion is destroyed.
Many circles of different sizes, representing a visualization of inequality
Stripes of various colors, corresponding to color words found in BlueSky posts.
A network with colorful nodes, representing "fireflies" in a simulation.
Structures made of disks, with a kind of organic form
A visualization of a 4D shape called the 24-cell.
An abstract of map of concepts related to inner conflict, with clusters on topics ranging from paradoxes to reluctance/guilt.
Histogram which shows clusters of features belonging to a pretrained model and a fine-tuned version. Most features are shared but some (role-playing, e.g.) only exist in pretrained; some (refusal) only after fine-tuning.
A hand holding a nail between two middle fingers in a highly unnatural way. Prompt: "A detailed image of a human hand holding a nail between the thumb and index finger. The hand is shown in a natural grip"
A right hand holding a sign. The full prompt for the image, as expanded by ChatGPT: "A realistic depiction of a left hand holding a rectangular sign. The sign is white with clear, bold black letters that read 'Left Hand.' The hand is positioned so the fingers grasp the top edge of the sign, with the thumb on the front and the other fingers visible on the back. The background is plain and light-colored to make the hand and sign stand out."
Chess board with indications of where pieces can move
rainbow color scales
Six networks diagrams representing dialog in Macbeth scenes
A visualization of colors seen in photos taken in Arpoador (Rio), arranged by season. Looks something like a circular rainbow.
NYT headline: Ever Want to Curl Into a Ball? Here's How Trilobytes Did It.
Left: SHAP diagram of classifier trained on standard MNIST. Right: diagram for modified data with spurious correlations (pixels at upper left)