Gatekeepers, Luddites, Haters and AI-Generated Maps – The Map Room

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I’m opposed to generative AI and all its works. According to some leading names in the cartographic community, that makes me a gatekeeper, a Luddite, and an irrational AI hater.

So, generative AI has come to cartography. The ICA’s Commission on Map Design has been posting examples of maps produced using generative AI tools, and there’s a website highlighting the ways you can use ChatGPT to generate maps using natural language prompts. The proponents of this stuff have been making some fairly inflammatory statements in its defence, such that I can only imagine they’ve been getting some grief about using it and are pushing back against it. Hence the stuff about gatekeepers, Luddites and haters. These are epithets I’ve seen thrown around before by pro-AI advocates in other fields where the use of generative AI has proven even more controversial. They’re not new. They’re also not worth taking seriously.

Let’s start with “gatekeeper”: the argument is that generative AI tools open the field to non-professionals who might not otherwise be able to make maps. The gatekeeper argument has often had merit: there have been many instances where tools that made things easier for mere mortals (iMovie for video editing, for example, or affordable digital SLRs) were dismissed or frowned upon by professionals whose livelihoods might be impacted by people empowered to DIY it instead. But the people touting AI-generated maps appear to be professionals, not people embracing a new tool to make maps they’d otherwise lack the skills to produce.

People like me, in other words. In the 23 years I’ve been blogging about maps, I’ve made no bones about the fact that I’m not a mapmaker. I have no cartographic skills whatsoever. I’d dearly love to be able to make maps of my own, and I’m deeply envious of people who have that skill. You’d think that an AI mapmaking tool would be a dream come true for me. But you’d be wrong: I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.

Partly that’s because I wear more than one hat: I’m also a science fiction/fantasy writer and critic, and in that field generative AI, which was trained on the work of so many of my colleagues without their consent, and which is has been used to inundate fiction markets with auto-generated slop, is professional poison. But mostly it’s because I wouldn’t be the one making the map: the AI is doing the work. I couldn’t claim it as mine, nor would I be able to enjoy the satisfaction—the joy—of having created something.

Great job 👏<br>— Twonks (@twonks.bsky.social) 2026-07-13T11:37:28.043Z

At first blush, using generative AI to make a map seems to fall somewhere between hiring a contractor to make a map for me and a rather too upscaled version of Google MyMaps or MapChart, and I’m not sure what the end result would be good for beyond personal, internal or limited-audience professional use (e.g. illustrating a slide deck). Maybe posting as a meme to Reddit, although subreddits are increasingly banning AI-generated content for some inexplicable reason.

That the people promoting AI-generated maps appear to be professionals is confusing. It’s one thing to experiment with an algorithmic tool that generates maps from natural language prompts, quite another to propose using the output of those prompts in actual work. One key problem is that AI-generated work is not copyrightable. Legally speaking, you don’t own the work. So why should anyone pay you money for an AI-generated map based on your prompts, or employ you to make one? Anyone can use the same prompts and get the same results. And then what? Would an AI-generated map be accepted for publication in the NACIS Atlas of Design or the GeoHipster calendar? (This question will come up. Have your popcorn ready.) Would anyone buy, on purpose, an entire atlas of AI-generated maps? (Amazon, Apple et al. are already flooded with AI-generated fake books designed to fool buyers.)

And in the event that AI-generated maps were widely adopted by the industry, it would not go well for professional mapmakers. Crow all you like about the time saved by using AI tools: it shows you haven’t been paying attention. AI adoption in other fields has not meant more leisure time for professionals. It’s led to mass layoffs, and precarious employment for the survivors whose work has shifted to checking and correcting AI outputs, which sounds very fulfilling. The savings, in other words, are not passed on to you. If anyone should be Luddites, it’s professionals—and please read up on the actual Luddite movement (preferably without asking ChatGPT) before deploying “Luddite” as an epithet. Luddites were opposed to low pay, poor working conditions and bad quality of work—and you should be too.

And we do need to talk about the bad quality of work. Large language models like ChatGPT are stochastic parrots: what they produce is not necessarily true. That is to say, they make stuff...