Trust Your Gut: Comparing Human and Machine Inference from Noisy Visualizations

People commonly utilize visualizations not only to examine a given dataset, but also to draw generalizable conclusions about the underlying models or phenomena. Prior research has compared human visual inference to that of an optimal Bayesian agent, with deviations from rational analysis viewed as problematic. However, human reliance on non-normative heuristics may prove advantageous in certain circumstances. We investigate scenarios where human intuition might surpass idealized statistical rationality. In two experiments, we examine individuals' accuracy in characterizing the parameters of known data-generating models from bivariate visualizations. Our findings indicate that, although participants generally exhibited lower accuracy compared to statistical models, they frequently outperformed Bayesian agents, particularly when faced with extreme samples. Participants appeared to rely on their internal models to filter out noisy visualizations, thus improving their resilience against spurious data. However, participants displayed overconfidence and struggled with uncertainty estimation. They also exhibited higher variance than statistical machines. Our findings suggest that analyst gut reactions to visualizations may provide an advantage, even when departing from rationality. These results carry implications for designing visual analytics tools, offering new perspectives on how to integrate statistical models and analyst intuition for improved inference and decision-making. The data and materials for this paper are available at https://osf.io/qmfv6

Tracking public attitudes toward ChatGPT on Twitter using sentiment analysis and topic modeling

ChatGPT sets a new record with the fastest-growing user base, as a chatbot powered by a large language model (LLM). While it demonstrates state-of-the-art capabilities in a variety of language-generating tasks, it also raises widespread public concerns regarding its societal impact. In this paper, we utilize natural language processing approaches to investigate the public attitudes towards ChatGPT by applying sentiment analysis and topic modeling techniques to Twitter data. Our result shows that the overall sentiment is largely neutral to positive, which also holds true across different occupation groups. Among a wide range of topics mentioned in tweets, the most popular topics are Artificial Intelligence, Search Engines, Education, Writing, and Question Answering.