Our Generated Maps Are AI Art

Background

We don't want to sell AI-generated artwork to anyone without them understanding that they're not purchasing another person's unique and creative expression, but rather a computer-generated design.

It's hard to speculate on how exactly generative AI is going to change our lives, but seeing how much it can already do, it's hard not to imagine its possibilities as endless.

We recently used AI to generate as many world maps as we could. The results are very interesting for what they are.

After printing a dozen or so for myself I've decided to offer them as prints because they are just too unique not to share.

Using AI to enhance AI art:

The maps we've made available were exported at a resolution of 2700x1800px. This isn't bad, but it's nowhere near printable considering the amount of detail hidden in the images themselves.

Using a second software, the artwork was creatively upscaled to get the images to a printable resolution. We say "Creatively upscaled" because the upscaling process is also using generative AI. This is convenient because the software draws more of what it thinks it sees. For the most part, what it "sees" is arbitrary objects, so adding more arbitrary details to these objects is great. Since we're not trying to upscale a certain thing to look a specific way, we just let the software interpret things how it wants. This allows it to be  "creative" with it and leads to more interesting features to be generated.

Noise: 

Something to consider is that there can be a considerable amount of noise from the generation of the image. Especially when there is any small lettering. Any words that the AI is trying to create will likely be gibberish.  We did what we could to make that noise into something nice to look at but can only go so far.  Here is an example: