Chatbot Landscapes: The bad old days

Note to loyal readers: Sorry for last week— I've now missed two posts for flu. Feeling better now. And by the way, you should read these posts in a browser. Email programs often mangle them.

OK let's get started. January is more chatbot experiments, following August and September. This time making fake landscape photos.

So, the bad old days: Twelve years before ChatGPT, Photoshop introduced "Content-Aware Fill." If, say, a handsome historian oops forgot to shoot one pane in a panorama of the swimming hole by Nemo, Photoshop could "fill" that distracting black box for him, with pixels that kinda-sorta looked like the surroundings:

Yeech. Next week: can the current generation can do any better?

Of course our historian always boxed and labeled the fake fill. Though sometimes subtly— a bottle of pop to the first man to find both at the School of Mines. Robert Wellman Campbell, "S.D. School of Mines, 1956-2024," robbcampbell.com. Robert Wellman Campbell, "Chatbot Landscapes: The bad old days," RSS Longa, 8 January 2026, public domain via CC0 1.0.