The following article was originally printed in the November 2024 Issue of Slush. To access the full article click here.

About a year ago, on a flat stretch of I-80 heading east towards Milwaukee, Caleb Kinnear tinkered on his computer. He sat in the car, oblivious to the conversation of the other passengers and to the world passing by through the window. He was busy. He was trying something new.

“I saw it from a GeoRainBolt video,” Kinnear said. “He was showing his techniques on how to find something from a music video. He was finding a specific trash can.”

In the video, RainBolt, a YouTube and TikTok personality whose videos are often a masterclass in Google Earthing and GeoGuessing, uses ChatGPT to create a code that could then be run in an open-source data site that maps the architecture of cities. The code was simple. It was designed to locate trash cans within a designated area. Kinnear, after watching the video, had a lightbulb moment.

“I could do the same thing with stair sets,” he remembers thinking.

Overpass Turbo, the open-source site, is a frustratingly simple split screen. On the right side is a digitized map. To the left, a blank canvas to enter code. For a layperson—that is, a person with no coding experience—the site is practically impossible to navigate. However, in the world of AI, do lay people still exist?

Kinnear opened ChatGPT and instructed it to create a similar code to the one he saw in the Rainbolt video, except this one would be targeted at stairs. Kinnear plugged the code—query, as it is called on Overpass Turbo—into the site. It worked. The map portion of the screen became littered with red dots, each one indicating a stair set in the city. Quickly though, it became too much. 

“It’s pretty hard to filter through all of the data,” Kinnear said. “It’ll show pretty much every stair set. It can be indoor or outdoor or two stairs or ten stairs. I still haven’t found the best way to filter it all out.”

Kinnear and I spoke recently, a long separation from that first day in the car on his laptop. But not much has changed in terms of progress. The code is still too broad. “What the fuck,” I remember Caleb muttering as we drove along last winter. “I’m either finding a two-stair or a two-hundred stair.”

A needle in a haystack may be too dramatic an analogy. It isn’t impossible or even that far-fetched to find spots using the AI-generated code.

“The rail in Racine that I did the boardslide on, that was because of AI,” Kinnear explained. “I found a spot in Colorado because of that too. So, I guess it has worked.”

It’s possible to find spots using AI, it’s just time-consuming. But then again, so is traditional Google Earthing. It’s tedious work to scour through cities, block by virtual block. And what is the alternative to that? Is it to go back to the way things used to be? Of course not. Ask anybody in the jib world who was around before the advent of Google Earth, the overwhelming consensus is that earthing changed things for the better.

“I thought it was the dopest shit ever,” Bob Plumb, a snowboard photographer said. “Because you didn’t have to just drive around aimlessly in a van. What you used to do, you would go to all the schools, and from there you would basically just take different roads out.”

So, does AI have the same potential as Google Earth? That’s yet to be determined. There is, however, another question, is it ethical? Ethical might be too strong a word. Snowboarding, at least at the jib level, isn’t governed the way other sports or associations are. Snowboarders most likely won’t go on strike like the screenwriters did last year over AI concerns in their work. But there is a social aspect. How will people look at you if you descend into the cyber-hole of AI?

“I was pretty impressed honestly,” Ben Marmer, another jibber who was in the car, remembers thinking when he first saw the use of AI generated code. “I wouldn’t think to just have ChatGPT write a script to give me these things.”

It seems the mantra jibbers carry in the streets carries over to the screen as well.

“By any means necessary,” Kinnear said.

But there is still the aspect of pride. There’s a bit of a holdout attitude that permeates through the discussions on AI. There are two sides here. There are the ones who are for it, and the ones who aren't.

“I definitely remember being like, ‘I’m better than AI’ type shit,” Marmer said.

It’s fair to feel a reticence towards new technology, that is nothing new. Socrates famously feared the written word, believing it would be an unreliable form of communication. People feared the printing press—and early telephones and computers—for the same reasons. Even in snowboarding there are photographers who have held firm their use of film in this increasingly digital world. So much of the human fear of new technology is derived from our inability to trust. Currently, we’re right not to put our full trust in AI. The technology is simply too new and too flawed. But we don’t need to put our full trust in it. We can look at AI as a tool, not a solution. And we can understand that this tool, like all tools, has limitations. We don’t even treat Google Earth—a much more trusted form of technology—as a cure-all. 

“I will say about Google Earth, I think that it’s a guide more than it is a way to find spots,” Spencer Schubert, A professional snowboarder and experienced Earther, told me. The truth is, he’s right. He’s talking about how Google Earth pins serve as a loose map. A pin is a direction rather than a location. Maybe the pin will work out, sure, but there’s probably a greater chance that you’ll find something more exciting on the way to or from the spot you were originally going to look at. Schubert went on to explore a similar logic with AI. “There have been a few times where it’s as good as you think,” he said, talking about those semi-rare moments when the pin actually meets expectations, “but the best is what you find in between whatever the technology gives you. You could plug in handrail,” now he’s talking about AI, “but you could never plug in, bump-to-bar over this trashcan that’s through the alley and your toe edge scrapes the wall. Those unique things are always serendipitous...”

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