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My Most Controversial Set Of Maps
Ian Wright
September 22, 2025
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I don’t believe in burying the lead, so everything I discus below is in relation to the following post: 20 Examples Of AI Being Dumb When It Comes To Making Maps.
But before I get to why they’ve been so controversial, I will just say that the explanation below is includes quite a bit of inside baseball about how I handle my social media posting.
If you just want to see some maps feel free to scroll past it!
Now, I’m no stranger to controversy when publishing maps. I’ve published maps on Israel, Palestine, Abortion, Minimum Wage, Prisoners, School Shootings, etc. and a whole load of other politically sensitive topics.
I’ve received messages calling me a communist, a fascist, a Zionist, an antisemite, an idiot or just telling me I’m stupid. And for that reason I long ago stopped reading the comment section on most of the maps I post.
All the same, it takes a fair bit to surprise me.
So I was genuinely surprised that some maps showing how AI is dumb, would become arguably the most controversial thing I’ve posted.
I personally find AI tools like ChatGPT incredibly helpful when it comes to running my business from drafting content ideas, to transcribing and cleaning up data to translations. It’s a very versatile tool that can do a lot of things really well.
But, one thing it still can’t do well is create maps. I’ve played around with ChatGPT to create useful maps from data, and it’s bad, really bad.
So when I came across a Twitter account @ChatgptLunatics aka AI being dumb, I had a really good laugh at all the dumb maps (and other AI mistakes) they’d managed to create using ChatGPT and other similar tools.
Their account has probably posted over 100 dumb AI, maps and I featured 20 of my favourites in my post.
Just by reading the title: 20 Examples Of AI Being Dumb When It Comes To Making Maps, you know these are not meant to be serious maps.
I’ve always received some criticism from certain people whenever I post maps I find funny. Those critics feel I should stick to serious topics only. My only reply, given the direction a lot of the world seems to be going in a little humour is no bad thing.
When I have a post that includes multiple maps, I’ll usually add each of them separately to my social media management software. This software then randomly pulls maps from a queue of maps.
The software doesn’t repeat maps until the queue is complete.
Overall, there are currently around 2,500 maps in the queue. So adding in these 20 means they represent around 0.8% or 1 out of every 125 of total maps I publish on social media.
But because the queue was around 90% done when these got it added, it meant that around 8% or 1 out of 12.5 maps was one these, at least until the queue resets.
And this is where the controversy starts to gather steam.
Overall, most of these maps have been extremely popular. 3 of the top 5 most popular maps this month come from this set. And like everyone else who operates on social media, I’m a slave to the algorithm.
But those that hated them, hated them a lot!
Of people who saw them, the breakdown into roughly 3 groups
92% of people who saw them didn’t interact with them in any meaningful way (which indecently is the norm across most of my social media posts)
5% found them funny, and liked, shared or commented positively.
3% hated them and commented and/or unfollowed accordingly.
Of the people who hated them I think they fell into one of two camps.
The first group understood that they were supposed to be jokes, but didn’t find them funny and/or found them funny but I thought I was posting far too many of them in too short a time.
The second group didn’t realise these were not supposed to be taken seriously and took them at face value as being legitimate maps. I did mention in the caption that these maps were according to AI and gave credit to the author as AI being dumb, which I thought would make it obvious.
That said separating reality from satire has never been more difficult.
Ironically, the people who commented that they hated it, probably actually improved its visibility. Most social media algorithms take comments (positive or negative) as a sign of engagement and so show the post to more people.
In any case moving forward, I’ll keep these any popular posts in the main queue just like I do every other map (Note: I relegate less popular maps to different queue which is shown less often), but I think the joke’s been more or less done so won’t be adding more of them in.
So for those that unfollowed me over this no worries. I’d love to have you back, but it will mean that 1 out of every 125 maps or so will be this joke “AI slop” as you’ve called (at least until the joke gets stale). And if that’s too much then I’m sorry to see you go.
In either case, I’ve rambled on far too much about this for one day.
And because I’m a glutton for punishment, here are 10 other controversial maps I’ve published over the last decade:
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