Seeing is believing, or so it was said up until AI required questioning everything. But even when braced to resist the slop roulette of online interaction, pictures are worth a thousand tokens.
Anthropic’s Claude AI model has been trained to do what may be more valuable than mere depiction: It can now generate not just static charts but dynamic visualizations, complete with sliders, buttons, and assorted animation control gewgaws.
Anthropic showed off an early version of this capability last fall under the label Imagine with Claude and has now rolled it out to customers as a beta service.
“Claude can create custom charts, diagrams and other visualizations in-line in its responses – and then tweak and modify its creations as the conversation develops,” the company explains in a blog post.
This is not artist style pilfering along the lines of Google’s Nano Banana or Midjourney. Rather its on-the-fly generation of JavaScript code using visualization library Chart.js, HTML, CSS, and whatnot. These are on-demand mini-apps, and they’re intended to be temporary rather than persistent tools like Claude Artifacts.
As an example, Antropic suggests you can ask Claude to show you how compound interest works. And after some churning of bits, the company’s AI service will emit an interactive chart with sliders that illustrates said financial miracle.
In the before-times, one might have had to scour the web for such a tool and visit various ad-strewn spamscapes before finding a workable option.
More interestingly, these just-in-time charting tools can evolve with conversations – after testing out the suggested “Show me how compound interest works” prompt, The Register requested the addition of an inflation slider. And lo, it was done, all for the very low cost of a few thousand tokens and some undisclosed amount of electricity and water.
Claude’s Periodic Table of Idiots – Click to enlarge
Just for fun, we asked Claude, “Show me an interactive table of elements but instead of elements, depict idiots.” To our surprise, Claude, so often playing the role of the responsible one in a cast of more mercenary models, complied with gusto.
The chart includes 36 elements detailed in popup windows, starting with 1 Ob, Obviousman.
The entry reads, “States the blindingly obvious with the confidence of a Nobel laureate. Will inform you it is raining while you are both standing in the rain.”
As a rehash of things people have complained about on the internet, wrapped in interactive graphic packaging, it’s not bad.
According to Anthropic, interactive chart generation is now on by default. ®
