A Rather Brief Excursion into Creative Cartography

There is a long-standing, rather conservative consensus that a map ought to represent things that actually exist. For several centuries, cartographers have labored under the dull constraint of reality, painstakingly drawing coastlines where the water meets the land, and placing mountains precisely where one might trip over them. It was a system that worked reasonably well, if you like that sort of literalism.

Then, on a Thursday morning that will no doubt be studied by future historians of corporate panic, Google decided that what geography really lacked was an imagination.

The technology giant introduced a feature to Google Earth that allowed users to deploy its AI image generator, Nano Banana 2, to superimpose fabricated images directly onto the satellite mapping of our planet. The stated goal of this exercise was to encourage users to "get creative with geography." It was an invitation to treat the Earth not as a physical sphere of rock and water, but as a rough draft in need of some light editing.

One can only admire the sheer, unblinking optimism required to launch such a feature. To look at a global database of satellite imagery—a tool used by journalists to verify war zones, by scientists to track deforestation, and by ordinary citizens to see if their neighbor has put up an unauthorized shed—and think, "What this needs is the ability to draw a giant, non-existent banana on top of the Andes," is a testament to the unique atmosphere of Silicon Valley.

The cartographers of the Renaissance, of course, used to draw sea monsters in the blank spaces of their maps. But they did this because they genuinely did not know what was out there, and a multi-tentacled beast was a more exciting placeholder than "here be nothing of note." Google’s innovation was to take a map where we know exactly what is there, down to the nearest meter, and invite us to pretend there is a sea monster anyway.

The experiment lasted precisely twenty-four hours.

By Friday, the feature had been quietly and hurriedly dismantled. The rollback was prompted by what Google described as screenshots of generated imagery that "appear to violate our policies." In the language of the internet, this is a polite way of saying that when you give several million people a tool to draw fake things on a map, they will immediately use it to draw highly inappropriate, misleading, or surreal things on the map.

It turns out that if you allow the public to edit reality, they do not use it to design harmonious public parks or thoughtful urban bypasses. Instead, they use it to place medieval castles in the middle of suburban car parks, or to suggest that a major European capital has been entirely swallowed by a giant, smiling turnip.

I am reminded of a childhood acquaintance, a young man of singular determination, who once attempted to improve his father’s road atlas by drawing a small, neatly colored lake in the middle of the West Midlands. He argued, with some passion, that the area was far too grey and would benefit from a nice spot for sailing. He was thoroughly disillusioned when, upon a family holiday to the region, he discovered not a sparkling body of water but a rather grim distribution center for a plumbing supply company. Google Earth had essentially institutionalized this young man’s disappointment, but on a planetary scale.

The swiftness of the rollback suggests a sudden, cold realization in the executive suites. One can almost picture the emergency meeting, convened at some ungodly hour, where a senior vice president had to explain to a room of bewildered colleagues that, yes, people were using the "creative geography" tool to create fake news.

"But we told them to be creative," someone must have whispered.

"They are being creative," the vice president would have replied, staring blankly at a screenshot of a fabricated volcanic eruption in the middle of London. "That is precisely the problem."

There is a broader, slightly exhausting trend here, which is the insistence that every piece of software must now contain an artificial intelligence, regardless of whether it makes any sense. We are living in an era where one’s toothbrush wants to have a conversation about dental hygiene, and one’s refrigerator is eager to write poetry about leftover mayonnaise. The addition of an image generator to a satellite map feels very much of this genre. It is the technological equivalent of putting a toaster inside a grandfather clock; both are excellent machines, but one does not generally want toast while checking the hour, nor does one want to know the time while browning a crumpet.

A map is, by its very nature, a contract of trust. We look at it because we wish to know where we are, or where we are going, or where we might go if we had more money and fewer responsibilities. Once you introduce the possibility that the mountain range on your screen is merely a suggestion generated by a algorithm that was feeling particularly artistic on a Thursday afternoon, the contract is broken. You are no longer exploring the world; you are merely browsing someone else’s daydream.

I spent a quiet hour recently looking at a traditional, paper map of the county of Wiltshire. It was a comforting experience. The hills were where they had been in 1994, the roads went to the towns they claimed to go to, and there was not a single prompt box asking me if I would like to see what Stonehenge would look like if it were made of cheese. It was dull, literal, and entirely reliable.

Google has promised that the feature is merely "rolling back" while they work on "stronger guardrails." One wonders what these guardrails might look like. Perhaps an algorithm that detects if a user is trying to draw something too interesting, or a system that only allows you to generate highly realistic, boring things, like a slightly different shade of asphalt or a slightly more depressed-looking shrub.

Until then, we must return to the old, unimaginative Earth. A place where the mountains are stubborn, the oceans are wet, and a map is simply a drawing of things that are actually there. It is, admittedly, a much less creative arrangement, but it does make it significantly easier to find the post office.