Wednesday, May 10, 2023

Mythical Creatures of the World

The Mythical Creatures of the World interactive map allows you to learn more about some of the strange and wonderful monsters that exist in cultures around the world. Mythical creatures appear in the folklore of nearly every culture. Some, like Scotland's Loch Ness Monster or Tibet's Abononimable Snowman, you have probably heard of before. Many of the monsters on this map, however, you have probably never heard and they have consequently never featured in your nightmares before. Until now!

This interactive map of the world's most terrifying creatures was made almost entirely by Artificial Intelligence, with only a little help from me. The data for the map came from Map Channel's new AI Search Map. I typed in 'Mythical Creatures' into AI Search Map and asked it to search the whole world. The result was this map of mythical creatures

I grabbed the KML created by that AI Search Map and then used this KML to GeoJSON Converter to turn it into a GeoJSON file. This GeoJSON file I then converted to a map tileset using Mapbox Studio. The image for each creature featured on the map was generated using Bing's AI Image Creator. The information text for each creature was produced by Google's Bard AI

Using AI to create the data, text and images for the map saved me hours of time. In fact the whole Mythical Creatures of the World map only took me about three hours to make from start to finish. Most of this time was actually spent manually entering prompts into Image Creator and Bard. Automating this process would mean that I could actually create a map like Mythical Creatures of the World in a matter of seconds.

6 comments:

Marco F. said...

https://mythical-creatures.glitch.me/ says "server not found"

Keir Clarke said...

@Marco - it is working for me. Perhaps Glitch was temporarily down when you visited.

Marco F. said...

No, Firefox still says the same thing (and I'm not behind a firewall):

Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.

We can’t connect to the server at mythical-creatures.glitch.me.

If you entered the right address, you can:

Try again later
Check your network connection
Check that Firefox has permission to access the web (you might be connected but behind a firewall)

Marco F. said...

UPdate to previous comment: I tried to reach https://mythical-creatures.glitch.me/ with the Tor Browser, and it does work. So what I have here is that that domain, and THAT domain only, is not reachable through my default internet connection/DNS. What may the reason be? Thanks

Keir Clarke said...

@Marco - I don;t know. I wonder if Tor blocks all sites created on Glitch. Can you access other sites hosted on Glitch like this virtual piano - https://piano-genie.glitch.me/

Marco F. said...

No, as I already said it's the opposite. With Tor, I CAN reach the website, and also the piano-genie one. It's when using firefox with my ISP that I cannot reach it. So it seems it is my provider (Vodafone) that blocks, willingly or not, "all sites created on Glitch"