Bad Neo-Nazi Maps

The National Rally is a French right wing party founded by former Nazi SS members and run by people with similar views. They’ve changed the party’s name and softened the rhetoric to broaden their appeal even if their positions have not changed much. They have predictably inhumane and ignorant views on immigration and if this map is any indication their ignorance of geography is also significant.

via Liberation (France)

This map appeared in the journal “Cahiers de l’Europe“ in an issue about critical maritime routes. It has many of the hallmarks of artificial intelligence. The Gulf of Hormuz is located in the Red Sea (on the wrong side of the Arabian peninsula) while its strait is located at the Strait of Malacca, whose location on this map is off the coast of Australia. The Gulf of Aden is also off by almost 1,000 miles. 

Moscow is shown at Istanbul, Cairo at Tripoli, and Colombo, Sri Lanka is located twice, once in Indonesia and another one in Somalia. Even Beijing (Pekin) is off by many hundreds of miles. The map also features an unmarked mystery city in the desert of western China. Norway and Sweden appear as an island, something I’ve seen in other AI generated maps. As a final touch the Atlantic Ocean is labeled in West Africa.

From an article in Liberation (France) (translated, admittedly by AI but vetted with my mild comprehension of French): “In this issue—dedicated to ‘Maritime Routes: A Crucial Issue for Europe’—one finds a history of the sea evidently cribbed from Wikipedia; didactic illustrations of Roman or Phoenician sailors worthy of a children’s magazine; a fair number of AI-generated images of ships; and a whole host of maps—most of which are illegible due to frankly atrocious editorial work.“

Ignorance of geography cultivates hatred and usually leads to bad decisions that we all pay the price for.

 

ICE Tours Vermont

IceToursVT  has led tours of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in and around Burlington, Vermont. “Think Hollywood star tours, but instead of celebrity mansions you get federal surveillance infrastructure. It's a little strange, a little spooky, and entirely real!“

-Map via Williston Observer

The goal is to raise awareness of how large a surveillance and prison apparatus exists in a very small metropolitan area. A bit ironic in a state where Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Von Trapp family came to escape from that kind of repression. The Department of Homeland Security is the fifth largest employer in the county with 8 different operations throughout the area. “So move over maple syrup, craft beer, and fall foliage-- ICE is the new attraction in Vermont!“

More specific information about the facilities can be found on their web site

Bad AI Maps - Part 3

 For the last two posts I’ve been showing some bad AI generated maps found on the internet. Here are a bunch of maps that I created with AI. While this is partly to have fun with awfulness of many of these maps I’m also pretty fascinated with the results. 

A quick note about these image generators: I tried to use traditional LLMs such as Claude, ChatGPT, Deepseek and Gemini but none of them would produce actual maps. Some of them kept asking me more specific prompts while others such as Deepseek gave me messages such as “I can't display images or interactive maps directly, but I can point you to some of the best sources…“ I therefore turned to two image generators, Freepik and Craiyon, both featured in my last post.

My first attempt was inspired by the BrilliantMaps post. I asked Freepik for a map of the smell of each country.

I never specified Africa or any other area of the world and I can’t help but wonder if a little of the racism in some AI models factored into choosing it. Smell does not need to have a negative connotation but it often does. Like many of these maps the text is weird and often unreadable and so are the flag and logo.

Next, I asked for a map of the largest mammal in each country (again no region specified). Here is the result for Freepik.

The Craiyon result was full of elephants. The Canadian breed, Australian and Siberian. The Chinese kangaroo (?) and the western US hippo (?) are also nice touches as is the fancy frame.

Next I decided to ask for noise pollution maps. Every time I ask Freepik, whether specifying an area or not it includes maps of China. Again, is some kind of prejudice at work? China = noise? Anyway this one is psychedelic.

I decided to ask Craiyon specifically for a noise pollution map of China for contrast. The resulting map is quite beautiful, if not exactly helpful. Note that both of these maps include Taiwan which may raise some hackles.

When I asked Craiyon without specifying a place name I got this imaginary city.

I started asking it for specific place names. Memphis was one of the more satisfying maps, even if the river is flowing in the wrong direction.

Here’s where it got really interesting. I asked Freepik to give me some noise pollution maps of Memphis to compare. In addition to two more maps of China, it gave me these two maps, both completely wrong but with a very similar geography.

The one above is more zoomed in while the one below contains a couple of Floridas and a Texas.

For a finale, please enjoy Craiyon’s map of world volcanoes.

Bad AI Maps - Part 2

I’ve been going deeper into the AI map rabbit hole. Here are a few more maps. The first two are from an image generating site called Craiyon. The prompt for this first map is World map with good countries in green and bad countries in red. 

While trying to generate my own map Craiyon suggested this US map highlighting 20 Ab InBev breweries, with St. Louis and New York marked. There’s well over 20 “AB” symbols on this map but you might spot a few other inaccuracies here.

Starryai is another image generator. This shows up as one of their featured maps and is a very strange mashup of history, highly altered geography and hallucinated text.

The geography bears little relation to Gettysburg, the battle information is dubious at best and most items on the legend are not on the map. Even as a fantasy map it doesn’t work well because much of the text is unreadable.

A post on Medium shows how bad a job Midjourney, a popular image generator is at creating a map of Ontario. The geographic similarity is none.

I’ve previously heard rave reviews of Midjourney’s ability to create fantasy maps. That influence is pretty clear in the above attempt. Clearly it is a lot better at fantasy than reality.

Here is one supposedly created by Gemini proving that White Europeans are in fact Caucasians.

-via Reddit

Finally, here is another Crayon creation. This one shows the national dish of each country with flags representing some interesting territorial claims. Some of the far eastern countries are left hanging, off the edge of the planet.

In a future post I will show some of my own attempts at using these generators.

Bad AI Maps - Part 1

This map has been making the rounds on social media lately.

I’m not sure where it originated. The Reddit post shows a Twitter (X) site for a travel concierge, but I’ve seen this in other places too. From showing a north-south route as east-west to the duplicate Hamburgs this one is full of AI “hallucinations”. Seeing this prompted more of a deep dive into what other crappy AI generated maps are out there.

It turns out that this fall Brilliant Maps did their own post on this. Most of these maps are from the chatgptlunatics Twitter and have a similar look, either a map of US States or European countries with prompts like this one.

These maps are full of unfinished or poorly spelled words. Or just weirdly generated ones as seen in Utah and Tennessee above. Here is a European example.

Gears? Dysies? I like that the common cause of death in Austria is “Austra”. The unreadable text for Portugal and Greece seems to be a common feature of these images. 

Here’s a few more I found. 

This one is from Facebook. The ones that point (even London) point to the wrong places. Others have no point. From this map I’ve learned that Rome (in France) gets slightly more visitors than “Rom”, in Spain. Also, there are some strange boundaries and merged countries in central Europe around the fake Istanbul. 

Here’s an interesting weather map of an extra elongated Nova Scotia with some duplicated cities, via LinkedIn.

The strangest one I found was generated from Freepik. For a future post I created my own account to see what I could generate, but here is one where another user’s prompt was A map of a map that says mellow. Granted the prompt is absurd, but the results are kind of wild. Does the world need an extra Texas and Louisiana? I tried to use a language detector to make sense of these words but very few of them were recognized. The ones that were ranged from Gaelic to Indonesian. Anyway enjoy the randomness.

 

Iran's Many Ethnicities

With all that is going on in Iran, it may be useful or at least interesting to see a map of the country’s ethnic diversity. As with many other countries, it is easy to think of today’s boundaries as reflecting homogeneous regions. This map shows a much more complicated picture. 

-CIA map via the University of Texas Map Library.

According to Wikipedia, Persians, often considered identical to Iranians only make up 51% of the population. Azeri’s (from Azerbaijan) make up 24% and are represented in purple above. Two of the northern provinces are named East and West Azerbaijan and there is speculation that should Iran’s government fall, Azerbaijan might look to grab these provinces. There is also a significant Kurdish presence in this and other regions. Also in the north are some significant minorities along the Caspian Sea coast such as Gilakis and Mazandaranis, whose populations make up 8% of the country’s ethnic breakdown. Less numerous but covering much more land are the Baloch, mainly based in neighboring Pakistan with a significant separatist movement in both countries.

Other significant minorities include Turkmen (on the border of Turkmenistan and whose color is hard to distinguish from the Talysh on the opposite side of the Caspian Sea), Lurs, and Arabs. It is also interesting to see how much area is “sparsely populated”.

The map also indicates many Sunni Muslims in the outermost regions of the country though according to Wikipedia they only make up 5-10% of the population.

CBS Radio Network

The once respected CBS network, before becoming the butt of jokes, has its beginnings as a network of radio stations under the Columbia Phonograph Company. By 1935 this network had a nationwide reach and extended into Canada. This charming map from that year illustrates and advertises its reach.

The map shows people listening to their radios (and sometimes singing along) while doing cliched activities for their regions such as driving a tractor in North Dakota,

hula dancing in Hawaii,

and whatever this is - some kind of emergency radio drop from a lighthouse?

My favorite one is the lobster listening off of Cape Cod.

I also like how the constructed a north arrow from a microphone.