GenAI for the Static Cartographer

It’s finally time for me to write something about generative AI. While I’ve made occasional comments on social media, I haven’t spoken in any detail. I touched on some colleagues’ genAI work in a recent blog post, but my focus wasn’t really on genAI itself — it was how and where its products were shared. Later on in this post, I’m going to discuss some of my experiments in using genAI tools. But first, I think it’s important to know where I’m coming from, so I will spend some time sharing my thoughts on the technology broadly. The short version is: I think its current iteration is deeply problematic, but I nonetheless use it sometimes, anyway. First, a note on terminology: I keep saying “genAI” rather than just “AI,” because artificial intelligence has been around since the 1950s in one form or another, and has been part of our daily lives since long before ChatGPT became famous. For example, I use Eduard for some of my shaded relief, which relies on machine learning algorithms, which…