Opinion: Trucker hats and sunflower dresses – AI images get Kansas all wrong

Artificial intelligence can create images that supposedly illustrate Kansas life and scenery. But it doesn't tell the whole story. (Illustration by Eric Thomas for Kansas Reflector)

Opinion

By Eric Thomas, Kansas Reflector

For the past few weeks, my son has been on the East Coast at a summer camp with his friend, another Midwesterner. They have been meeting kids from all over the country — actually, all over the world. 

During a phone call the other night, he told us about the mock-horror that others displayed when they found out that he was from — of all places — Kansas. They were joking, but still …

“Do you ride horses to school?”

“Wait, you like shopping at Target? Do you have those in Kansas?”

“You must work in the cornfields, right?”

He has been a Sunflower State celebrity, although I am sure few of the kids know anything of our state flower. 

Ask people from elsewhere in the country what they know about Kansas. What you get back is often a reductive monoculture: agriculture, rural isolation and, yes, “The Wizard of Oz.”

The cultural fuel for these stereotypes includes books and movies, songs and TV shows — and the internet certainly contributes.

Largely built on the raw material of the internet, artificial intelligence has been fed blog posts, news stories, Wikipedia entries and worse. And if you consider Reddit posts and chat rooms as “intelligence,” you have an odd definition of intelligence. Artificial intelligence largely knows what we have already typed.

With all of this in mind, I went on an internet field trip this week to see what AI thinks about Kansas. Specifically, I was interested in seeing what visuals it creates about Kansas.

You might have seen something similar in your social media feeds: people prompting AI image generators to provide “The typical family from Wisconsin” or “The most stereotypical couples in each state according to AI.” Many of the AI images were filled with hallucinations, such as an impossible M.C. Escher-esque picnic table and puzzling limbs. 

Asking different AI models about Kansas showed how single minded the internet is about our state. To ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, I asked: “Please create a photorealistic illustration that shows the most Kansas family ever.” 

(Kansas Reflector doesn’t publish work created by artificial intelligence, a limit that I understand. So, that’s why the images aren’t included here. However, I bet each model would regurgitate something along these lines with the same instructions.)

The three images were disturbingly similar: each with a quartet of mom, dad, son and daughter. The figures were all white, including a crowd of dozens in the background of the ChatGPT image. The dads were rocking denim and, most often, hats with blurry John Deere logos. The moms carried freshly baked pies or a picnic basket as they smiled at the nonexistent camera. The kids? Wearing replicas of overalls, a Kansas City Chiefs jersey or T-shirts from Kansas State University or the University of Kansas. 

In the backgrounds, agriculture for miles. 

Some questions: 

• ChatGPT: Why is there a four-foot-tall version of the John Deere patriarch standing right next to the other, normally sized John Deere patriarch?

• Copilot and ChatGPT: Where are you shopping that allows you to find so many sunflower-patterned dresses? 

• Gemini: Why are we lighting a grill in the middle of a sunflower field? 

• And to all of them: Is everyone white in Kansas? 

Certainly, everyone is attractive in the AI version of Kansas. The surroundings are idyllic — except for the tornado looming in ChatGPT’s version of Kansas. (Why does everyone in the crowd seem so calm?)

These visual mix-ups and cultural uniformity about Kansas might seem pretty innocent.

Asking an AI model to imagine Kansas is going to invite pick-up trucks, farms, Jayhawks, golden retrievers and BBQ-spatula-wielding dads. These images are pretty harmless. They’re only as deceptive as their reinforcement of stereotypes about what is normal in Kansas. 

What I found more corrosive and dangerous was asking an image database, Adobe Stock, to provide images from the state. When searching the image collection, you can choose photographic images from real human photographers. Or you can select “Generative AI Only.”

What a difference a click makes. 

When you exclude generative AI from your search, you see stock images of Kansas: weather vanes standing along barbed wire fences, windmills at sunset and yes, tornadoes. It’s a limited view of the state, but accurate. 

When you review a grid of AI images though, it’s delusional Kansas. 

Behold the database’s “Aerial View of Lawrence: A Vibrant Summer Town in Eastern Kansas from Above.” Except it is not. Generated with AI, it’s an image that resembles Lawrence with evening sun illuminating low-slung office buildings and patchy farmland in the distance. But the geography and architecture have been disturbingly scrambled to create Bizarro-Lawrence. 

For Topeka, another image in the database has created a wide tree-lined path cutting right through town and becoming a main boulevard slicing right through town. That doesn’t exist. 

Another artist created “Ruined Cityscape of Topeka, Kansas: A Tragic Urban Landscape.” The image looks like a more grand and architecturally re-imagined Topeka High School in shambles. Thankfully, the image leans more toward illustration than photograph, so few people are likely to be deceived. 

Most confusing is an image titled “Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site.” It isn’t.

The actual Topeka historical site was converted from Monroe Elementary School, a two-story brick and stone building with a tile roof. The AI image showcases a magnificent modern monument, all windows and right angles. Who made this AI version? An artist who appropriately calls themselves “Lalaland.”

How are we to be warned away from using this image? Adobe provides this text: “Generated with AI. Editorial use must not be misleading or deceptive.” How could this image be used in a non-deceptive way?

The image collection also provides a map of Kansas — one that seems to have been made by a drunk cartographer. The outline of the state is accurate: the rectangle of Kansas with a bite out of the northeast corner. The map appears to be vintage-ish, as though printed on antique paper. 

But what is the deal with the curving lines that carve up the state? Are those cities? No. Are those counties? No. Just aimless and meaningless boundaries. They are the misleading vagaries of an AI model. 

And what is the U-shaped line swerving through the state? A wayward river? An imagined highway? Nope. Just an AI hallucination.

It’s like this everywhere that AI images live these days. 

The images paint Kansans as pie-baking, white, rural, attractive caricatures. And artists are submitting images to stock agencies, redefining our state’s cities and historic landmarks.

While one AI image might not destroy the truth on its own, they conspire as a group to make us doubt our eyes. We are forced to read the fine print for disclosures. We must do reverse image searches to see if the image exists elsewhere. We must zoom on our devices, pinching and squinting at limbs to see if they are distorted. 

In 1995, I played with Photoshop, the image manipulation tool, for the first time. I saw the power of rearranging pixels to tell a different story. I wrote an earnest philosophy paper about the power of lying through digital manipulation. Since then, I have spent many hours teaching students how to use that digital power ethically.

That 1995 version of Photoshop is nothing next to our 2025 apps that create AI images. Artificial intelligence requires less time, less creativity and little training. And yet the images are more likely to deceive.

With apologies to you, dear Kansas reader, I must say it: “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in 1995 anymore.”

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

This article was republished with permission from the Kansas Reflector. The Kansas Reflector is a non-profit online news organization serving Kansas. For more information on the organization, go to its website at www.kansasreflector.com.