{"id":252662,"date":"2026-05-22T13:42:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T17:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/22\/when-ai-imagines-cities-smaller-communities-can-disappear\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T13:50:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T17:50:08","slug":"when-ai-imagines-cities-smaller-communities-can-disappear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/22\/when-ai-imagines-cities-smaller-communities-can-disappear\/","title":{"rendered":"When AI imagines cities, smaller communities can disappear"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/news-releases\/1129373\">When AI imagines cities, smaller communities can disappear<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/news-releases\/1129373\">https:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/news-releases\/1129373<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-05-22 13:42:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.eurekalert.org\">www.eurekalert.org<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>image:\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Jungwhan Kim, Virginia Tech\u00a0College of Natural Resources and Environment\u00a0geospatial data scientist.<\/p>\n<p><\/strong><br \/>\n                  view <span class=\"no-break-text\">more\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"credit\">Credit: Photo by Max Esterhuizen for Virginia Tech.<\/p>\n<p>When\u00a0College of Natural Resources and Environment\u00a0geospatial data scientist\u00a0Junghwan Kim asked an artificial intelligence (AI) image generator to create a picture of Blacksburg, the result wasn&#8217;t quite right.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe image looked generic,\u201d Kim said. \u201cIt didn\u2019t capture what makes Blacksburg unique.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But when he asked the same system to create images of larger cities such as Richmond, Virginia Beach, and\u00a0Washington, D.C., the results looked much more recognizable.<\/p>\n<p>The images included familiar landmarks, waterfronts, and city features that reflected the character of those places.<\/p>\n<p>That observation sparked a research question: Does AI do a better job representing large cities than smaller communities?<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>The study,\u00a0published in Technology in Society, examined how OpenAI\u2019s DALL\u00b7E 2 image generator created images of three Virginia localities \u2014 Blacksburg, Richmond, and Virginia Beach \u2014 and&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/news-releases\/1129373\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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:&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":252664,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/mediasvc.eurekalert.org\/Api\/v1\/Multimedia\/7e60b8ff-1a45-4e19-91e2-076ce163301f\/Rendition\/thumbnail\/Content\/Public","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-252662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252662"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252662"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":252666,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252662\/revisions\/252666"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}