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.