> 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.