What Will RCLC Properties and Gualala
Look Like in The Year 2123

Have you ever wondered what Mill Bend, Cooks Beach, or Gualala might look like 100 years from now? That question was put to the test with the help of Microsoft Bing Images, an artificial intelligence (AI) engine and online app that creates images from textual descriptions. For example, when the following text was entered into Bing’s AI engine: “What will Cooks Beach in Gualala, California, look like in the year 2123 with rising sea levels, existing concrete stairs and a railing that goes down to the beach?”

…it created the above image, along with three other possible images, of how Cooks Beach might appear 100 years from now.

If you’ve been to Cooks Beach, you’ll see that the above photo is a fairly good representation of how Cooks Beach and the adjoining shoreline might evolve over the next 100 years. Somehow, Bing’s AI engine figures out the flora and fauna of Gualala and is able to create a pretty good, but not accurate, conception of what Cooks Beach might look like. In this case, however, the AI engine does not really know what Cooks Beach looks like or what Gualala looks like.

Yet in the case of Mill Bend, when you click the link below to view many more images, you’ll see that some of the images are pretty good representations of Mill Bend. It appears that Bing’s AI Image creator has access to some aerial photos of Mill Bend as the images show Mill Bend as being on the estuary of the Gualala River. That information is not in the textual descriptions used to create the images. So somehow, that information must have been derived from online information and images that Bing’s AI Image creator is able to access.

Remember, when you look at the images, they are a vision of what things might look like 100 years from now. They are not RCLC projections, and they might not reflect what you would imagine. It’s simply a bit of fun, playing with AI, seeing what AI–in its nascent developmental stage–can create, and possibly start a conversation about how the world might evolve considering climate change.