When AI imagines cities, smaller communities can disappear
When AI imagines cities, smaller communities can disappear
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1129373
Publish Date: 2026-05-22 13:42:00
Source Domain: www.eurekalert.org
image:
Jungwhan Kim, Virginia Tech College of Natural Resources and Environment geospatial data scientist.
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Credit: Photo by Max Esterhuizen for Virginia Tech.
When College of Natural Resources and Environment geospatial data scientist Junghwan Kim asked an artificial intelligence (AI) image generator to create a picture of Blacksburg, the result wasn’t quite right.
“The image looked generic,” Kim said. “It didn’t capture what makes Blacksburg unique.”
But when he asked the same system to create images of larger cities such as Richmond, Virginia Beach, and Washington, D.C., the results looked much more recognizable.
The images included familiar landmarks, waterfronts, and city features that reflected the character of those places.
That observation sparked a research question: Does AI do a better job representing large cities than smaller communities?
A new study from researchers at Virginia Tech, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), and the University of Alabama found the answer is yes.
The team discovered that AI-generated images were consistently better at representing larger metropolitan areas than smaller towns such as Blacksburg. The findings raise questions about how generative artificial intelligence tools portray places and whose communities are most visible online.
The study, published in Technology in Society, examined how OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 image generator created images of three Virginia localities — Blacksburg, Richmond, and Virginia Beach — and…
