You hear people realize that it's kind of "bad" that cities are population sinks, and they realize that all this stuff they're building such as improvements to their house, family records, traditions, area-related songs, even things like "good relations within our little area of the city" or "alliances between my cultural group's institutions and those from other groups", are all pointless since the groups will decline and decline til all are gone and dead.

Somehow though this goes naturally with how people spend much more time on groups which naturally do continue colonizing and expanding their mental, cultural reach and power by converting new members: charities, sunday drinking brunch traditions, adult sports leagues, their schools of art and politics

My current take on this is that

This isn't even the first, or second, or third time this has happened

Sometimes you'll look at old history books of your town and find out that there used to be all kinds of old, beautiful, carefully crafted and bold, proud, gigantic buildings, scenes, cultural institutions and artistic movements even in your own town; you can see their huge old buildings in old pictures, the mobbed scenes of people moving around all dressed up, finally made it to the big city and making their fortune, having fun, away from the smalltown mentality.

And this went on and on, they did it, they achieved what they wanted, and few had kids, and those kids had few kids or left, and one day the last person to remember even that there used to be a cool library-bar combined hangout spot at ALL in this entire neighborhood, is dead, and nobody remembers it, and the building is gone and knocked over and a parking lot now and ofc totally illegal to build today. And this is the actual history of our great cities. Death, forgetting, leftover abandoned clubs, charities buildings. Cities are population sinks, like battlefields.

SF is even more so this way than other cities.

Many go in and few come out.

Below here are logged prompts and the iterations of my attempts to make images of this.

I have included because a friend pointed out that he wanted to see the actual text and the full scope of which parts of an image were mine, vs just spawned from the ai image generator's default library of cliches.

I'm planning to improve the display system for these but whatever happens I'm going to keep doing something with AI images.

"Could you help me illustrate this concept from the study of American city History? "You know how when you look at the history of cities you find so much stuff which was totally forgotten? Like how in sf by ocean beach there use to be huge public swimming pools, and a train line down the coast on the cliffs to San Jose! And other huge amazing affairs and creatuons in 1840 or whenever. I think the reason we keep forgetting the is that "CITIES ARE POPULATION SINKS" so everyone who created them and visits them is not around anymore and has no descendants which survived until today." Make a me style image luminosity may not be low luminosity, don't make it murky and make the images beautiful. The world's fair, old giant creations etc with beautiful illustration"

Good but make it square and actually show the great railways along the coast the dalliances, the fun towers, the presidio seaside megaresort, etc. and make them coear. Notice for example the tonality of the image and mans back is soooo dark. That's bad

Let's make it a little bit better. So really, sometimes you'll know, you'll read about a place or you'll see an old stone inscription, and it'll be the cornerstone to a building that was built in, say, 1820, and that persisted and absolutely boomed and was huge and thriving for a hundred years, 120 years, until it was knocked down in 1930. And now it's nothing but scabby old used parking lots. This is all over the country. No one remembers that these amazing buildings were there. When you look up the pictures, it's glorious, these huge exchanges and markets, libraries, ideas. They're all gone. We don't even remember they existed practically. That's the first change you should make. Include stuff about that. The second change in the new version of the image, you're totally remaking it from scratch with everything you know so far and the new things, is the title should be something like, why are there so many forgotten monuments? Why don't we even remember the things that used to exist in our cities? Like, when you look under the current layer of stuff, there's so many brilliant ruins, most of which, like, if you look in old pictures, you'll see stuff that's like, well, there used to be a boardwalk here with very clean wood, you know, extending for a mile, with hundreds of little, you know, candy shops and 1920s, like, musical theaters and vaudeville shows and kids rolling, you know, cartwheels and those wheels along with the stick and the pennyfarthings, and those crazy big bicycles. Like, that used to all be around here. And all those stores that sold those people's clothes used to exist. And the warehouses and the schools that they used to go to, their old library, it all used to exist here. And they all, they all just decided not to have children. They said, oh, maybe next year, maybe next year. Delay the marriage. Oh, my lost love will never come back to me, I'll never love again. And you must include stuff about this in the image too. They grew older, and their one cousin ended up choosing not to marry, actually. And Johnson never did return from the war. And Susie, well, she found that she did love the library actually, enough to devote her adult years, all the years from 30 onwards, she decided to devote to the study in the library. And when she died, her small, small savings was given to the library fund. And was put away until we reached today. And ne'er a soul remembers these days and these people. Make it like this, more nostalgic. Totally remake the image. Thank you.

No, don't add that poem towards the end. You added that, I did not ask you to add that. You need to have phrases like, you know, Cousin Marcy decided not to marry after all, and things like that. Like, these sort of little decisions that people make over time add up to population sinks. The second major change you need to make is, this phrase about cities are population sinks must be towards the bottom of the image. It cannot be near the top. Because that, in effect, that is sort of the closure, the residue, the like resolving phrase that explains the image. You cannot put it as the second line of text at the top, it kind of ruins the sort of division of the thing we're trying to do. Otherwise, you're doing very well. One final comment, the images are getting a little bit murky and a little bit over-textured and over-painterly. They're very painterly now, and they're too much. I think it would be really great to make it a little bit clearer and sharper and purer, like, vector art, cell, anime cell style drawing, please. If you don't mind, all right?

I don't really like it when models add their own "cheerful" messages at the end. I do have to write an article about how to defeat (at least at the present, it will get harder I think) those attempts to interfere, nudge, and influence people indirectly which models do.