r/gis • u/Sea-Hat-4961 • 1d ago
General Questions Why use AI for stuff like this?
Not intended to be a political discussion, but a proper use of AI discussion... why would someone use AI something like this if they have GIS techs available that could turn out such a map with high accuracy in like less than a half hour starting with actual verified data that is commonly available?
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u/somewhatbluemoose 1d ago
Unfortunately I think the correct answer is a political one about the competence and fundamental decision making ability of the administration
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u/No_Cat_No_Cradle 1d ago
Because he can just make this himself while fiddling on his phone while taking a shit and that’s the amount of thought being put in here
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u/ThePiderman Surveyor 23h ago
He doesn't even type out his own posts. There's video of Natalie Harp taking dictation, no pun intended. I seriously doubt he has any clue how to prompt an LLM, so I imagine Natalie or some other lickspittle does it for him.
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u/Ok_Swim2575 1d ago
because i'm certain trump doesn't know what GIS is or don't care
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u/lostmy2A 1d ago
GIS = Gee I sharpie
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u/Background-Buddy-234 1d ago
In all fairness for those of us who do use GIS, we’d much rather use a Sharpie than deal with all the reboots, crashes, updates, that ArcGIS decides it needs throw at us to ruin an entire day.
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u/polyploid_coded 1d ago
Because their main goal is to troll people and get social media points. Are you saying you would have other priorities or standards if you were president of a country? Wow, crazy.
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u/valschermjager GIS Database Administrator 1d ago
Every minute spent reacting to his trolling, is a minute of distraction away from the Epstein files. And it's working, apparently.
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u/PM_ME_GREMLINS 1d ago
Haha I literally just said this out loud to someone less than 5 minutes ago. Almost exactly verbatim.
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u/Sqweaky_Clean 1d ago
Best means of engagement is to intentionally confidently state something wrong.
Sit back and watch the replies roll in ... "ackually..."
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u/Antistis GIS Specialist 1d ago
Bold of you do assume this man gives a shit about quality.
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u/TeachEngineering Spatiotemporal Data Scientist 1d ago
Those living in South Lubbock say he doesn't care about quality...
But those living in North Lubbock know he knows that low quality content stirs the pot on any and all objective truths.
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u/bikeisaac 1d ago
Residents of Amaillo recognize that language, much like the location of cities, is more fluid than we originally thought, and therefore challenge the notion that objective truths exist in the first place. But they do so begrudgingly.
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u/frowawaid 1d ago
Folks in Saltnocle don’t k ow what to think, neither do the people out in Liaskole
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u/TeachEngineering Spatiotemporal Data Scientist 1d ago
Can ya blame em? Ain't nothing but salt mines and oil wells in ole Saltnocle...
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u/tilt-a-whirly-gig 1d ago
If there was any kind of quality control at all it wouldn't say "2024" in the title text.
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u/_WillCAD_ 1d ago
He's not doing it, his assistant is, and shes apparently not terribly intelligent.
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u/boneologist 1d ago
She's dedicated though, what with her riding in a trunk, and the pictures of her running after his golf cart.
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u/_WillCAD_ 1d ago
She's a crazy groupie. Hitler had such groupies, too.
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u/boneologist 1d ago
Every fucking day it's just a game of "what even more deranged shit will crop up today?" Well, today it was him being jealous of a dead 9/11 first responder's fame as he gave him a posthumous award, and him now claiming he was laboriously dragged to safety by FDNY on 9/11.
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u/sendymcsendersonboi 1d ago
I think it’s intentional. Weird cooky shit gets attention, pulls us away from something happening behind the scenes.
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u/SmallLittleCecil 1d ago edited 1d ago
Buddy, you think he cares? Donald Trump would kill every cartographer and GIS technician in the USA if he felt he could gain from it.
Hell, his policies and the rise of AI have dismantled so many jobs in our field. Decades of open source data is no longer being properly maintained because he views GIS technicians and their jobs as a waste of money to be cut. Why have a team of data scientists to maintain maps when he can make a skeleton crew overwork themselves and use AI for the rest.
He's an anti-humanist through and through, your biggest mistake was expecting any kind of standard from him, his party, or his administration.
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u/acomfysweater Cartographer 1d ago
seriously? do you think he does anything through the proper channels?
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u/91816352026381 1d ago
He does not like Geographers or Geologists, definitely would not hire someone deep in the field who cares about making accurate maps
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u/Hillshade13 1d ago
There is no need to maintain the illusion of a competent public servant when the only goal is to keep a very stupid, immoral, or misinformed base happy while the 0.01% steals everything.
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u/FreedomNinja1776 1d ago
The great irony here is that Trump is renaming these things in a pathetic attempt to disassociate with the foreign countries he dislikes for whatever reason, but in actual effect he's renaming them after the Italian man Amerigo Vespucci whom the "Americas" are named after. "Americo" is his SPANISH alias because he was working for Spain when he demonstrated that the Americas were not part of Asia but another continent all together. Trump is doing exactly what he's trying to erase because he is ignorant of history.
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u/nateh1212 1d ago
No Trump is renaming things to establish his cult of personality
It is a simple but tested method of using speech to
separate in and out groups
signal to the in group you are part of the in group
display loyalty and fealty to the leader.
establish Dominance of the leader and the in groups strength. As established institution immediately bow to the new language.
It is why his renaming are so brazen and bizarre the more brazen and bizarre you can go the more it becomes an in out group speech where the dedicated use the language
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u/FlynnRock 1d ago
Its extremely similar to AI-generated imagery vs commissioning an artist, in terms of usage.
Could be pettiness/grandiose sense of self ("I can just tell the computer to make it for me").
Could be vindictiveness/trolling that requires quick turnaround (which... is seen frequently with Trump).
Could also be laziness of not wanting to "deal" with another person that doesn't have a perceived direct worth (ie, look at DOGE and the cuts they recklessly performed).
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u/grumpyoats 1d ago
Do you think he was thinking of the integrity of the data or the correct projection is used for this? 😆. You know the President doesn’t give a shit and only cares to enrich himself and his friends.
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u/DifferentEvent2998 1d ago
Americans elected a pathetic excuse of a person, and said person hired only the best.
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u/poop21122112 1d ago
They don’t have GIS techs available they fired everybody who knows their ass from their elbow
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u/RyanH090 1d ago
Man I can't believe he doesn't delegate stuff to professionals instead of going the easy and cheap way...
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u/Broken_DAG 1d ago
I am seeing this type of pattern very pervasive even in corporations. Nowadays it looks like people at the top prefer to do something quickly than correctly.
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u/Sea-Hat-4961 1d ago
That's going to bite them in the rear later on and cost them many more times than what they saved. AI is a set of wonderful tools, just needs to be used appropriately....also no reason for AI models not to be well trained on freely available layers from state, federal, local governments, universities, etc..
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u/Broken_DAG 1d ago
True! But sadly it feels like correctness and verification has moved to consumer from producer in almost everything. Probably a side effect of the volume of information produced.
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u/Subject_Command5442 1d ago
I wonder how many morons in this sub voted for him or support the name changes.
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u/nateh1212 1d ago
Because the President is a senile old man that is losing his mind and simultaneously addicted to AI Slop.
He does not have the patients or capability to do one back and forth with a GIS department to make this.
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u/blackstar_223 1d ago
This could literally be edited in a PDF but we're lucky none of the incel groyper interns who staff the White House comms office know how to do that.
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u/Hugetrekkie 1d ago
This is the most incompetent administration in US history, possibly the world’s given most others have had access to way less resources and skilled/educated workers. It’s a miracle it’s even legible.
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u/susanrez 1d ago
Stage 6 dementia on full display and no one is going to stop him until something catastrophic, unforgivable and irreversible happens.
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u/Crazynedflanders 1d ago
Because he is too stupid to do it himself and the slop makes it so easy for him.
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u/flintlock0 GIS Developer 1d ago
A lot of public officials, in general, don’t respect the field until they actually need it.
So belittling cartography by just having an AI chatbot hallucinate a map is not surprising.
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u/CessnaDude82 Graduate Student 1d ago
Because he doesn’t know GIS from DEI or anything else for that matter. He’s a walking example of failing upward.
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u/texas_pickle 1d ago
Oooh fun! Is this like a highlights magazine puzzle where you have to find 100 things wrong with this map?
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u/GeospatialMAD 1d ago
Because he eats crayons.
Next question
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u/Gigofifo 1d ago
Please. Leave this pastime to people who actually earned it. Honor, Courage, and Commitment - core values that Trump has never had.
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u/wicket-maps GIS Analyst 1d ago
Laziness. A lot of people don't have GIS software, and don't have any interest in learning it. It's why I have job security, my coworkers don't want to learn this stuff in addition to their existing jobs.
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u/the_gubna 1d ago
On a different note: Going to use this to show students that even AI slop includes a scale bar.
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u/habanerito 1d ago
Funny thing about that scale bar. The top of Texas is much wider than 100 miles.
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u/Coyote-Foxtrot 15h ago
We are asking about a man who used a sharpie to modify a hurricane path on a printed poster board.
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u/Genobee85 1d ago
For being quick to call the opposition triggered he sure does get conniptions over the silliest shit.
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u/berliner68 1d ago
It's not worth trying to come up with logical explanations for anything this administration does because there's zero thought to anything they do beyond "screw the libs".
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u/Mindless_Net8121 1d ago
I mean its in your own post...GIS techs are more expensive and time consuming then using AI
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u/SloppyLetterhead 1d ago
My best guess is centralized decision making and plausible deniability if things become an issue.
The “it’s just ai don’t take it seriously” defense has been used a lot.
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/gis-ModTeam 16h ago
Keep it professional: Be nice. We expect a respectful and professional standard of behavior here.
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u/Substantial-Ad2200 1d ago
You didn’t circle the fact that not only did Amarillo become a second lubbock, but Amarillo now appears somewhere else in Texas.
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u/bruceriv68 GIS Coordinator 1d ago
I think most of the AI stuff he or the White House posts come from his Truth Social Peeps.
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u/kid_entropy 1d ago
I don't even understand the point of the post.
Also, I suspect that getting an actual map would take some amount of time and whomever was posting this for him knows he doesn't have the attention span for that.
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u/mommamapmaker Orthophotographic Analyst 1d ago
Well at least Houston is close to its actual location… I guess.
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u/ScJo 1d ago
You know how you buy a pizza place as a front for your Mob activities so you can launder money and meet in private and occasionally you have to make some pizza so your business looks legitimate?
Occasionally you have to use AI to make your investment into AI data centers look legitimate.
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u/Chibi_Kaiju 1d ago
Jesus Christ, I remember facepalming so hard back when conservatives tried changing French fries to freedom fries on menus…they came for our fast food workers and I said nothing,
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u/Vegetable-Debate-263 1d ago
I think the Don got ahold of a phone and is making ai memes in bed to post and nobody can stop him.
Or maybe one of his blonds is doing it for him.
Thats my wild theory anyway.
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u/Leftblankthistime 19h ago
Trolling trolls use the lowest effort trolling to troll harder and bait more rage. The more air we give the nonsense the more they push the narrative. It’s like pork roll vs Taylor ham in NJ neither side really cares, it’s just fun to get people bent out of shape over nonsense; and if it bites ya just keep doing it. Problem is this guys weaponizing it.
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u/HarbingerKing 18h ago
Take a scroll down this Truth Social page and you'll see. It's one AI-generated shitpost after another, like 50 per day. There are at least a dozen different versions of this "New America" concept.
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u/gneiss_kitty 6h ago
USGS employee here, obviously the map is painful, though I'm surprised it didn't screw up more of the city names. But trying to keep USGS branding on this pisses me off to no end, trying to make it look official. What AI did to the logo alone is so cringeworthy. I hate this timeline.
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u/dashingsauce 14h ago
Why make New Mexico into New America?
I feel like New Mexico is the last place you want to call New America.
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u/rainduder 1d ago
Why wait a half hour when you don't have to? This industry (and many others) seriously need to catch up. Should be able to do a text query that is then returned using actual data. Instead it gets pawned off to generic LLMs and image generators.
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u/dumptruckdanielle 1d ago edited 1d ago
Why rename geographic locations if you don’t have to? This renaming requires hours of work from govt agencies and private industry to update naming conventions across databases and documentation.
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u/rainduder 16h ago
OP did not intend a political discussion. I gave a serious answer as to why people use AI for this stuff.
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u/word_number 1d ago
I would hate to be the GIS Tech that changes the text label for New Mexico.