Terraforming the Metaverse

This morning I've been helping create a satellite map of a world that doesn't exist. Thanks to the combined forces of the human imagination and the cutting-edge power of AI technology, I've been able to contribute to a new digital landscape that is being created in real-time. That's right people - today I helped terraform the metaverse! 

This Map Does Not Exist is an AI generated satellite map which is being created by Artificial Intelligence in response to user prompts. You can contribute to the map yourself by finding a blank space on the map and by clicking on the 'generate a custom landscape' button. You are then asked to enter a prompt for the creation of the satellite image at that location. Based on your prompt a new satellite-realistic map tile will then be added to the interactive map. 

The nature of your prompt is only limited by your imagination. You can choose to create a satellite image of anything you want. It could be an icy mountain range or it could be a colossal, giant chicken egg. The project's GitHub page doesn't provide much information on how This Map Does Not Exist actually works. However the description a 'collaborative inpainter' provides some clues. ‘Inpainting’ is a technique employed by AI image creation tools to seamlessly fill in missing portions of an image. Therefore the 'terrain diffusion' tool used by the map is probably an AI image inpainter creation tool that has been trained on satellite imagery.

Obviously the format of This Map Does Not Exist doesn't have to be that of a satellite map. You could create a 'This Picture Does Not Exist' map which was an emerging collaborative painting, similar to the collaborative images that have emerged on r/place.