As I often mock the AI-slop maps that I see on X (“Twitter”), my account has apparently responded by sending even more garbage my way. One example recently caught my attention as perhaps the worst map that I had ever seen. Then, several days later, I encountered something even worse.
The first map, from the inaptly named blue-check account called “Logic Universe,” misplaces most of the countries that it highlights for having received massive loans. It labels the western United States as “Mexico,” northeastern France and environs as “Greece,” northwestern Russia, Finland, and the Gulf of Bothnia as “Ukraine,” and Brazil as “Argentina.” But that is the least of its problems. The base map that it uses is bizarre. It hallucinates a second Iberia and western Africa, which it has attached to South America. Its depictions of the Caspian Sea and the Gulf of Mexico are ludicrous. It does not, in short, even come close to being a legitimate map.
The second map comes from an account called “The Index Insiders,” which has some 20,000 followers and supposedly focuses on “Global Ranking, Facts, Wealth, Culture, Maps, Economy, Statistics & Data.” AI (Grok) tells me that its “signup metadata points to India.” Its map in question, which purports to show “U.S. Wars and Conflicts in the Past 30 Years,” at least depicts country shapes more or less correctly. But its labels are a hilarious mess. The United States is labeled “Canada,” France is labeled “Kosova,” Spain is labeled “Irax,” Turkey is labeled “Afghanistan,” Saudi Arabia is labeled “Yemen,” Egypt is also labeled “Yemen,” Libya is labeled “Syria,” Algeria is labeled “Libya,” and Peru is labeled “Somalia.” The color scheme, along with its minimalist key, tell us that the U.S. has been engaged in wars or other conflicts with most of its NATO allies over the past three decades, as well as with Switzerland, Austria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia. Most egregiously, the map detaches Africa from Asia and joins it instead to western South America.
As far as county sizes and shapes are concerned, the worst offender that I have found was posted by a different account, one called “World Insights.” This pseudo-map of “famous landmarks” in Europe depicts Lichtenstein as roughly the same size as Germany. Enough said.
In a 2023 article called “Viral Cartographies and Fake Maps on Social Media Platforms,” geographer Jörn Seemann insightfully explores some of the pitfalls generated by fraudulent maps that are widely circulated online. As he aptly writes, “virtual and viral cartographies make it more difficult to discern fact from fiction or joke from ideology.” But the problematic maps that Seemann highlights are models of tongue-in-cheek clarity compared to the AI-slop maps that are circulating today. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
