Generative AI Agents as Generalized Data Visualization Tools

Every practicing scientist will need to produce data visualizations. At present, the most common way to accomplish this is with dedicated software tools, be they GUI-based (i.e., Origin or Excel) or text-based (i.e., Python or R). In both cases, one must have intimate knowledge of the structure of graphs, from the perspective of the tool, to control the design of the plot. However, newly emerged LLM-based generative AI chatbots can both write and run code that will produce data visualizations. Such chatbots effectively serve as a generalized front-end for text-based plotting tools that remove the need to know all the specific terminology of the tool. Herein, we show how one can use these tools to process data and plot it, all using a natural language interface.