  Creating compelling captions for data visualizations has been a longstanding
challenge. Visualization researchers are typically untrained in journalistic
reporting and hence the captions that are placed below data visualizations tend
to be not overly engaging and rather just stick to basic observations about the
data. In this work we explore the opportunities offered by the newly emerging
crop of large language models (LLM) which use sophisticated deep learning
technology to produce human-like prose. We ask, can these powerful software
devices be purposed to produce engaging captions for generic data
visualizations like a scatterplot. It turns out that the key challenge lies in
designing the most effective prompt for the LLM, a task called prompt
engineering. We report on first experiments using the popular LLM GPT-3 and
deliver some promising results.

Computation and Language;Artificial Intelligence;Human-Computer Interaction