A couple of months ago, I (Anna) wrote about my frustration with not being able to find an AI art assistant to create a  map to illustrate a post I was doing for our personal website (newsfromnan.com) about Dick’s family’s domestic migration from Buffalo, New York, to San Diego, California.

At that time I was exploring Canva, and I had had a positive experience with that tool’s creating cartoon images from my photos of real crows.

I provided a text description of the migration map I wanted, and I got results like the following:

I learned a lot from that experience and others about what AI art tools and assistants can and can’t do (or, at least couldn’t do at the time).

More recently, I was getting help from Perplexity with the context behind another migration story: that of my maternal ancestors’ migration from Germany to the United States. In the course of my dialog with Perplexity, I asked it to illustrate my family’s migration, which it did with this image:

I was so happy with the result! It was exactly what I had hoped for in the prior experiment.

If I had more time to devote to AI art, I’d go back and try again with other tools. As those of us experimenting with GenAI already know, there’s something new out there almost every day!