Comment by rafram
1 day ago
> This project is far from perfect, but without generative models, it couldn’t exist. There’s simply no way to do this much work on your own
100 people built this in 1964: https://queensmuseum.org/exhibition/panorama-of-the-city-of-...
One person built this in the 21st century: https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/truckers-viral-scal...
AI certainly let you do it much faster, but it’s wrong to write off doing something like this by hand as impossible when it has actually been done before. And the models built by hand are the product of genuine human creativity and ingenuity; this is a pixelated satellite image. It’s still a very cool site to play around with, but the framing is terrible.
It feels like whether or not it's possible to make a model of new york misses the point. This kind of project could just as easily scale up to be an isometric map of the entire world, every city, every forest, every mountain hut, and update continuously as new buildings are built and cities grow. Expensive yes, for now- but the speed and scale to make and maintain such representations will absolutely be outside the realm of what was previously possible. Not just maps of the world, maps of human knowledge, history, to such detail that would entail not just tens of thousands of hours but billions or trillions of hours if done by hand.