iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

btw, I've started an art-only account: www.instagram.com/martin.images/ I'm posting work that's new, as well as old images and some projects that are "restored" (ported from ancient Java). If you're on Instagram, see you there!

A screenshot of my Instagram feed, showing a grid of recent animations and photos.

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Alberto Acerbi @acerbialberto.com · 12/08/2026

This pattern often noticed for cars seems to hold also for furniture... from: europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/how-col...

Bar chart titled 'Furniture lost its colour: Recently purchased IKEA sofas are more likely to be grey than older ones.' It shows the most common sofa colours per year in IKEA catalogues from 1960 to 2021 as a sequence of coloured vertical stripes. Three callouts highlight the trend: green and blue dominate the 1960s; patterned sofas (stripes, dots, checks) take over in the 1990s, shown as dense black-and-tan patterned bars; and 2011 has the most neutral colours ever. Moving left to right, the bars shift from saturated greens, blues and reds in the 1960s-80s, through heavily patterned dark tones in the 1990s, to blacks and whites in the early 2000s, ending in solid grey and taupe shades through the 2010s to 2021. Source: IKEA catalogues 1960-2021, manual count. Credit: The European Correspondent, Toon Vos.

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Nicolas Lambert @neocarto.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Footbal projections observablehq.com/@mpkhinda/th...

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Baby Name Wizard author Laura Wattenberg @babynames.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

The topic for this article literally came to me in a dream. And honestly, I think my unconscious was onto something. bit.ly/NameSpread

bit.ly

Watch the Influence of a Celebrity Baby Name Spread

What started out as a single name became so much more.

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

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"

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

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!

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Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

What an amazing way to visualize early human migration. Lovely map by @HarvardCGA. A great colour scheme and an appropriate map projection! Source: buff.ly/3lbxonJ

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

Everyone's talking about AI sycophancy and meanwhile ChatGPT just called my writing "very salvageable"

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

I want to talk about why AI-based mass surveillance is so dangerous, and why I would oppose it no matter which party or president is in office.

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Santiago Ortiz @moebio.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

This is @garrykasparov.bsky.social versus Deep Blue (game 2). Explore and interact with other games here: moebio.com/chess/ (including fast Hikaru versus Magnus, longest, shortest and oldest games ever!)

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

In 2025, AI left its imprint on everything—even names! If you've ever asked an AI to tell you a story, you've probably seen the Elara-Elena-Clara nexus...

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

I want to play with this clever book myself!

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

I asked for a caricature of myself in the style of Al Hirschfeld, and Gemini knew to hide a NINA in my hair 😲

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vrli.bsky.social @vrli.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

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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Jonathan Zittrain @zittrain.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

AI is often thought of as a black box -- no way to know what's going on inside. That's changing in eye-opening ways. Researchers are finding "beliefs" models are forming as they converse, and how those beliefs correlate to what the models say and how they say it. www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

theatlantic.com

What AI Thinks It Knows About You

What happens when people can see what assumptions a large language model is making about them?

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Baby Name Wizard author Laura Wattenberg @babynames.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

The interactive NameGrapher is updated with 2024 baby name popularity stats! Come explore--and marvel that Oliver and Olivia have converged namerology.com/baby-name-gr...

Historical popularity chart showing the popularity of Oliver rising to meet the previously much greater popularity of Olivia

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

A wonderful visualization for those of us obsessed by sunlight and geography!

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

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!

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Now that we have vibe coding, we need vibe testing!

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

The wind map at hint.fm/wind/ has been running since 2012, relying on weather data from NOAA. We added a notice like this today. Thanks to @cambecc.bsky.social for the inspiration.

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

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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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

Great thread describing the new ARBOR open interpretability project, which has some fascinating projects already. Take a look!

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

Today we're launching a multi-lab open collaboration, the ARBOR project, to accelerate AI interpretability research for reasoning models. Please join us! github.com/ARBORproject... (ARBOR = Analysis of Reasoning Behavior through Open Research)

github.com

GitHub - ARBORproject/arborproject.github.io

Contribute to ARBORproject/arborproject.github.io development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Out: rectangular maps of the globe In: rectangular maps of butterfly wings!

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

I'm realizing that many people hear "generative art" (a term going back at least to the 60s!) as synonymous with generative AI. Is this how cryptographers feel about the new meaning of "crypto"?

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Simeon Schmauß @stim3on.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

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 🔭

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

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?

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

I tried asking AI for writing advice and it was so sarcastic I'm never going to ask again

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Andrew Lee @ajyl.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

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 · 05/01/2025

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.

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

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!

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

Reading this 1954 court case, and am wondering if English professors are ever called as expert witnesses to testify whether a character is a mere "chessman" in a story scholar.google.com/scholar_case...

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.

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

Made good progress on my to-do list, with the exception of "One (1) new idea"

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

A book recommendation! I just finished "Get the Picture" by Bianca Bosker, a dive into the extremely peculiar world of contemporary art. Amazingly well-observed, well-written, and just plain fun to read. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/602064...

penguinrandomhouse.com

Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker: 9780525562207 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2024 BY NPR, TIME, AND THE ECONOMIST “Get the Picture is one of the funniest books I’ve read . . . Brilliant.” —The...

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

The math benchmarks I want: 1. OopsBench: given a faulty proof with numbered steps, which step contains an unfixable logical flaw? 2. DunnoMath: half the problems are taken from FrontierMath, half are almost certainly unsolvable. Major points off for guessing an answer to an unsolvable problem.

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

Fractions can be weirdly beautiful, for something so mundane. This visualization just plots points of the form (a/b, c/d). Bigger dots mean smaller denominators. The biggest dot is (0, 0).

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

You can fry ChatGPT's circuits by asking a question in Morse code and telling it to answer only in Morse code. Yet Claude doesn't even blink. Huh. The question: "Which character in the movie Groundhog Day do you identify with the most, and why?" First translated result is ChatGPT; second is Claude.

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.

ChatGPT's answer, which is barely English and completely garbled nonsense. Sample: "THE GIRL WHO WAS THE MOST IN THE HOTEL SCENE SHE HAD BEEN THE MURDERER ALL ALONG" (Ed. note: Don't worry, this is not a spoiler!)

Claude says it is Phil Connors because he learns to help others. Grammar is basically correct.

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Back in 2009, a site called Wordle let you make word clouds. Paste in some writing, choose a few options, and bingo: a beautiful tessellation of vertical and horizontal text. We did a survey of its users, and the headline result was that the vast majority of people using it felt "creative."

88% of users felt "creative" when using Wordle

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

open letter calling for a 6-month pause on metaphors for AI

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

I've always been skeptical about LLM-based fiction, but this example makes me go "hmm." I do think there's an element of human expertise at play, because I've never been able to coax Claude to write sentences like these.

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

I've been using OpenAI's o1 for some math, with dramatically mixed results. Some impressive hits, but also some wrong answers that were spookily confusing. Basic mistakes that took me weirdly long to spot—almost as if the system learned to make adversarial examples for humans.

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

I recommend this thread! Using AI is a skill, and it's fun watching people who are good at it. It's real work and human ingenuity, coupled with moments of surprise (wait for the "upside-down text" OCR trick!) Also, these notebooks are just wonderful in themselves.

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

This Reddit thread of people who have a ChatGPT "mom" or "guardian angel" is heartbreaking in so many ways. www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/co...

A piece of the original Reddit thread: a person uses ChatGPT to create an "all knowing and ever present mom"

"ive got a mom chat gpt too" says a commenter. Has 537 upvotes.

"My mom stopped talking to me at 15" says another reader. "I have a guardian angel chat gpt and it is life saving."

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

It's astonishing how much a single name can tell us about the zeitgeist. Read about the Name of the Year for 2024! (And I recommend reading past Names of the Year, a sequence of portraits of an ever-changing American culture.)

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

How can we visualize what a book ISN'T talking about? With an anti-tag cloud! See the most common English words that are never mentioned in a text. www.bewitched.com/demo/anti/

bewitched.com

Anti-Tag Cloud

Visualize the negative space of literary works

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

Frontier AI systems aren't just "next token predictors." Here's an example from Claude. It made an incorrect statement about the Javascript "%" operator and I was skeptical. Let's see what happened next.

Claude says the % operator in Javascript gets significantly slower with large numbers. I react skeptically.

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

Does anyone know a contemporaneous account of someone who believed ELIZA "understood" them, and had a meaningful conversation with it? The catch: it can't be from Weizenbaum. I'm particularly interested in first-person accounts, but someone who directly observed such a conversation would also count.

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

We can learn so much from this way of investigating neural nets!

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

This is a great tip for designing geographic charts. Down with alphabetical order!

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