Some of these days are absolute gifts for a little mappy silliness and here’s one of those days. World baking day? Let’s just make a map made out of locally specific celebratory cake. TWO minutes this one took. And all those people who consider AI is never going to challenge their jobs well just take a look – can you use ANY other tool to make this map in even close to 2 minutes and a prompt.

I was chatting to my co-conspirator Ian the other day about some of the findings of our experiment to date and it’s really a question of perspective. Yeah – we could all feel threatened by technological change, but if that were the case I’d have been unemployable upon graduation with my skills in scribing, placing letraset, and using the darkroom. But I had to pivot. GIS. AML, MapBasic, GUIs etc. Then coding came along, and now instead of a picture saying 1,000 words we’re back to having to use our geographical nous to DESCRIBE the geographies of the maps we want to create. Sure, it’s a technology that is emerging but it’s moving FAST, and if you’re thinking that it’s sloppiness is going to help preserve your job then just think of every technological change and its impact upon map-making. Always 2 or 3 steps backwards before mass adoption and moving forward.

Anyway, have a piece of cake.

Original Prompt (ChatGPT)

It’s world baking day! Time to go a little crazy with an artistic map of the world envisaged as cakes of all sorts of different types. Maybe time to make the continents and countries look like cakes synonymous with those places. And position the map on a baling sheet covered in flour, jam, cream and chocolate chips. Add whatever additional baking paraphernalia you want. This is supposed to be a fun celebration cake!