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Martin Wattenberg

@wattenberg.bsky.social

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

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Martin Wattenberg@wattenberg.bsky.social · last mo.

The one paper I review that desperately needs an ethics discussion is, predictably, the one paper that omits one. Meanwhile, the other papers are utterly innocuous and have long statements that are basically "Air currents created by typing this paper may potentially lead to a hurricane in 2029"

Martin Wattenberg@wattenberg.bsky.social · last mo.

This is such a fantastic paper! We need more of this kind of empirical work on what people really do with AI. The idea of the "solipsistic reader-writer" seems important. Also, the paper is so well-written!

Melanie Walsh@mellymeldubs.bsky.social · last mo.

Excited to share this. @neel2112.bsky.social, @mariaa.bsky.social, and I analyzed 500K anonymous ChatGPT convos (shared w/ consent from WildChat) to see if people were generating fiction. We found tons of stories, fanfiction & erotica. Many users iterated on the same stories for days and weeks.

Screenshot of paper abstract that reads: AI FICTION IN THE WILD Neel Gupta Maria Antoniak Melanie Walsh Some professional authors are beginning to use AI tools to help produce their fiction writing. Are readers using AI to generate fiction, too? Drawing on over 500,000 anonymized, English-language ChatGPT-user conversations (Zhao et al.), we find that more than one third of the conversations involve some form of fiction generation—including original stories, roleplay, fanfiction, and erotica. This AI-generated fiction is notably dominated by power users. We identify common fiction generation patterns and profiles among these users, including what we call infinite story demanders, who repeatedly request and revise variations of the same or similar narratives over extended periods of time. We show that users especially gravitate toward fanfiction and erotica, and that they are broadly drawn to generic forms, repetition, immediacy, and niche combinations of story elements. Our findings motivate two theoretical provocations. First, we argue that AI technologies may lead to a shift in the conventional relationship between the author and reader, potentially producing what we call a solipsistic reader-writer, who both generates and consumes fiction within a closed conversational loop, interacting with a machine rather than a human other. Second, we note that LLMs enable interactivity, play, and permutation in ways that are seemingly pleasurable for users, raising questions about where AI will fit into contemporary storytelling and entertainment ecosystems. We situate these developments within broader transformations in literature and media, including self-publishing, fanfiction, and pornography, and suggest that AI-generated fiction shares structural affinities with on-demand, personalized, and repetitive cultural forms.
@vrli.bsky.social · last yr.

Charts and graphs help people analyze data, but can they also help AI? In a new paper, we provide initial evidence that it does! GPT 4.1 and Claude 3.5 describe three synthetic datasets more precisely and accurately when raw data is accompanied by a scatter plot. Read more in🧵!

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Martin Wattenberg@wattenberg.bsky.social · last yr.

An incredibly rich, detailed view of neural net internals! There are so many insights in these papers. And the visualizations of "addition circuit" features are just plain cool!

Chris Olah@colah.bsky.social · last yr.

Can we understand the mechanisms of a frontier AI model? 📝 Blog post: www.anthropic.com/research/tra... 🧪 "Biology" paper: transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribu... ⚙️ Methods paper: transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribu... Featuring basic multi-step reasoning, planning, introspection and more!

Martin Wattenberg@wattenberg.bsky.social · last yr.

Neat visualization that came up in the ARBOR project: this shows DeepSeek "thinking" about a question, and color is the probability that, if it exited thinking, it would give the right answer. (Here yellow means correct.)

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Simeon Schmauß@stim3on.bsky.social · 2y ago

What a beauty! This is comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) passing through the field of view of the LASCO C3 coronagraph. It wasn't for certain whether it would survive it's closest approach to the sun on January 13th, but it did and delivered us a spectacular show! #comet #C2024G3 🔭

Martin Wattenberg@wattenberg.bsky.social · 2y ago

Idle question: Are there any papers from legit math journals using emoji as notation? We already use every symbol on the keyboard, musical sharps and flats, and even weird made-up fonts (what is that Weierstrass P??). A smiley is easy to draw with chalk and put into LaTeX, so why not?

Andrew Lee@ajyl.bsky.social · 2y ago

New paper <3 Interested in inference-time scaling? In-context Learning? Mech Interp? LMs can solve novel in-context tasks, with sufficient examples (longer contexts). Why? Bc they dynamically form *in-context representations*! 1/N

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Martin Wattenberg@wattenberg.bsky.social · 2y ago

If you're the kind of person who likes thinking about the sky (and I am!) this is a wonderful visualization to explore. So many patterns, each with its own story.

Cees Bassa@cbassa.bsky.social · 2y ago

For the 4th year in a row, my all-sky camera has been taking an image of the sky above the Netherlands every 15 seconds. Combining these images reveal the length of the night changing throughout the year, the passage of clouds and the motion of the Moon and the Sun through the sky. #astrophotography

This image shows the hourglass shape of the nights shortening and lengthening from winter to summer and from summer to winter, passing clouds, the Moon passing through the night sky every month (diagonal bands) and the Sun climbing higher in the sky during summer.
Martin Wattenberg@wattenberg.bsky.social · 2y ago

In art and literature, "criticism" doesn't mean "pointing out flaws." It's something bigger and more interesting than a referee calling fouls. I think we should have the same ambitions for data visualization criticism!