Apologies for the long post in advance (maybe I should turn this into a blog post).

Invisible Cities is one of my favorite books, and I've re-read it several times. It's a great "travel" read and always puts me in the mood to explore. It's also a very romantic book, obviously the cities have all named after women, so it evokes conquest in the sexual sense as well. It's also a piece of surrealist/allegorical literature in the same vein as Daumal's Mount Analogue (which also tops my list).

Back to the website. While this is an impressive tech demo (as they all are), it's clear that AI misses the forest for the trees, and here's a tangible example. I randomly clicked on Theodora. Honestly, I didn't even remember which city this was until I re-read the Calvino passage:

> Recurrent invasions racked the city of Theodora in the centuries of its history; no sooner was one enemy routed than another gained strength and threatened the survival of the inhabitants. When the sky was cleared of condors, they had to face the propagation of serpents; the spiders' extermination allowed the flies to multiply into a black swarm; the victory over the termites left the city at the mercy of the woodworms. One by one the species incompatible to the city had to succumb and were extinguished. By dint of ripping away scales and carapaces, tearing off elytra and feathers, the people gave Theodora the exclusive image of human city that still distinguishes it.

So, what do we know about this city? We can make a short sensible list:

    1. It's an imperialistic (or at least millitaristic) reflection of man's will to power (as Nietzsche might put it)
    2. It's decidedly anti-nature, the natural flora and fauna being its primary antagonist
    3. It's been destroyed and rebuilt many times
    4. The city is built by literally ripping away bugs and birds; tearing their wings from their bodies like a cruel child might
    5. Nature is slowly winning (and maybe it already has)

This[1] is what AI saw. Now, this isn't bad, really. But it's so embarassingly pedestrian, it hardly counts as a visualisation. It just heard "city with animals and stuff" and made a 3D model. But it's all, in that uncanny-valley kind of feeling, wrong. Why is the city itself a grid? Why is there a library in the center?

Calvino, again, on Theodora:

> But first, for many long years, it was uncertain whether or not the final victory would not go to the last species left to fight man's posession of the city: the rats.

The vibe here is an overrun rat's nest of a city. A disgusting bloated corpse; more:

> The city, great cemetery of the animal kingdom, was closed, aseptic, over the final buried corpses with their last fleas and their last germs.

I see an overrun New York. I see a city built on a decaying graveyard. AI sees animals and humans living in a kumbaya harmony, but that is not what Theodora is: it's an eternal conflict between man and nature (and nature won a long time ago). For the record, this isn't even that particularly deep. Many authors and poets write about this eternal human struggle: the taming of the wilds. But Claude just doesn't get it. I hope readers of the book do.

Anyway, I leave you with this. I found an artist, Rian Hotton[2], who put brush to canvas to show us what he thought Theodora looks like[3]. And this... this is more like it.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/hXrKVg3

[2] https://www.facebook.com/rianhottonartist

[3] https://imgur.com/a/tR0qTYx