“Plotting with natural language: "Create a scatter plot of column A ver….”
No, the tedium of boilerplate code was a feature. Charts were generated by template so styling was consistent, making charts a bit more bland but easier to consume and check. You cannot achieve that same level of consistency or predictability with ai without reinventing a wheel. The models change too fast, and they all want to differentiate themselves for brand reasons, and the emphasis is on fast and easy, not on slow and foolproof, there’s no documentation of the work the way code provides documentation and an easy audit trail. You can restrict the ai by giving specs (use ggplot, use color template foo, create readable code with unit tests), but these are all similar tradeoffs as you might make with human labor too.
What llm do is to simply lower human value, not remove it entirely.
Just as results needed checking and replication before llm, they will continue to need checking and replication by humans. The humans won’t be compensated nearly as much, but humans are humans and so are not.
This is why reading the whole post is important :)
You seem to think I'm suggesting the use an image generator for plotting. Don't do that, it will screw that up, image models are not made for that. The use for AI here is to save 5 minutes writing the code to generate the plot, or to edit the style (again via code) of the plot.
If you do plt.scatter(x,y, c="blue", marker="o") that is a function call in Matplotlib. Its API notoriously sucks. Most Python plotting libraries just create convenience functions around this library because although the API (actually there are two and the documentation is not consistent on which to use) is hot garbage, and the documentation is labyrinthine, the plotting engine itself is powerful.
> What llm do is to simply lower human value, not remove it entirely.
The value in a plot is not the exact code used to make it (beyond the code being correct). The value is in the visualization giving the reader an "ah-ha" moment. I would much rather take the 5 minutes I save writing a function call, and use it to spend more time examining the plot itself.