📰 State Journal falls prey to AI fabrications

📰 WSJ Re-Reports Story After AI Errors Uncovered

• The Wisconsin State Journal took down and re-reported a story on development proposals for a vacant downtown lot after errors and fabrications connected to an “unauthorized use of AI” were discovered.
• The original article on plans for Brayton Lot, east of the Capitol Square, presented plans by Neutral, a Madison real estate development firm, that did not match what appears in the proposal Neutral submitted with the city. The article also quoted a “Marcus Lee,” owner of “Capitol Grounds Cafe,” neither of which exist.
• A new, corrected version of the story was posted on July 17, along with an editor’s note that said, “We regret this incident and are taking steps to make sure it does not happen again.” The original article’s author, Audrey Korte, is no longer with the newspaper, according to an auto-reply on her email. [Isthmus, 🔒 WSJ]

💰 The Legislature Has Approved a Budget. What Now?

• The Wisconsin Legislature avoided its usual protracted and acrimonious budget process this session, forging a rare bipartisan agreement on a $111-billion 2025-27 budget that was signed by Gov. Tony Evers on July 3.
• But with floor sessions scheduled until January, the Legislature still has plenty on its plate. The GOP-controlled Assembly and Senate could take up measures involving immigration, gender-affirming care, advanced practice nurse licensing, and even whether Wisconsin should stop observing daylight saving time.
• 🎧 Dig deeper: Just what was in that budget, anyway? On the City Cast Madison podcast today, host Bianca Martin talks to Cap Times state government reporter Erin McGroarty about how Wisconsin residents will feel the effects of the budget. [ 🔒WSJ, 🎧City Cast Madison, Cap Times]

🎮 Raven Software Lays Off Employees

• Less than 20 workers at the Middleton video game developer Raven Software were among over 9,000 employees laid off by parent company Microsoft on July 2.
• Raven was founded in 1990 and later purchased by Activision, which itself was purchased by Microsoft. The studio has produced a series of acclaimed and popular games, most recently entries in the bestselling “Call of Duty” franchise. [Raven Software, WPR]

The maps are as beautiful and detailed as any in a world atlas, with every river, town, and mountain painstakingly rendered and identified.

The only caveat? The places aren’t real. They only existed in the imagination of fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien.

For decades, UW-Oshkosh geography professor Karen Wynn Fonstad was the world’s most prominent “fantasy cartographer.” She created the “Atlas of Middle-Earth” in 1981, painstakingly re-creating Mount Doom, Rivendell, and other locations from the “Lord of the Rings” world by drawing from descriptions in J.R.R. Tolkien’s many books.

Before her death in 2005, she also made maps and atlases that charted the worlds of “Dungeons & Dragons,” “Dragonriders of Pern,” and other fantasy literature. Her son Mark Fonstad, a UW-Madison graduate and a geography professor himself at the University of Oregon, has curated a retrospective of his mother’s work, “Fantastic Worlds,” that will enthrall “Lord of the Rings” fans and mapmakers alike.

“Fantastic Worlds,” featuring dozens of Wynn Fonstad’s original hand-drawn maps, will be on display until Aug. 1 in the Robinson Map Library in Room 310 of UW Science Hall, and Mark Fonstad will host chats about his mother’s work on July 24 and July 30. He talked with Madison Minutes about his mother’s work.

Why do you think maps are such an important part of fantasy literature?

People who enjoy a particular fantasy story get invested in [it], and because it’s not a real place, they are putting themselves, their own minds into that. And anything that adds to that is great, because you can’t go visit it.

There’s a long tradition, even before Tolkien, of fantasy maps, sometimes called literary maps, that would actually go with the text. You find it in books hundreds of years ago, and now more than ever. You watch the introduction of “Game of Thrones,” and it’s a fantasy map.

How did your mother use Tolkien’s books to create the maps?

She would read them multiple times, and anything she found that would have some sort of geographical information she would underline. The few maps that Tolkien had done didn’t have a lot of detail, so most things that he talked about were not on his maps. So she had to basically do detective work.

He also had a knack in his books for incredible world-building detail, so there's far more detail than there is in most fantasy books. It’s clear that he had pictures in his head of places he had been, like in Germany, and he would imagine them, but on steroids.