Austin creativity, music and tech top new AI city rankings

The robots think Austin is creative, smart and sexy.

A new artificial intelligence-powered ranking suggests Austin’s national reputation is built on creativity, music, friendliness — and even sex appeal. The site inequalities.ai used a large language model, GPT-4o-mini, to compare major U.S. cities in millions of head-to-head matchups. Researchers asked the system to choose which city was safer, more creative, more welcoming or more innovative, forcing it to pick one city at a time.

Each matchup was asked twice to test consistency. Austin earned points when it was chosen both times and lost points when it wasn’t — meaning that scores with higher numbers show how much better Austin ranked than the cities it was compared to. The final score reflects how often the AI selected Austin over other cities and is based on perception, not hard data.

Austin’s reputation is built on creativity and music

Austin’s strongest identity is cultural.

The city scored 142 on whether people are more creative and 138 on whether the city itself is seen as more creative than others — placing it among the country’s top cities for artistic reputation.

Music remains central to that image. Austin scored 89 for having a vibrant music scene and about 87 for having better music and musicians, reinforcing its “Live Music Capital of the World” branding.

The only cultural category where Austin lagged slightly was museums, with a score of 22.

Education and innovation fuel Austin’s tech image

The rankings also reflect Austin’s tech-forward reputation.

The city scored in the high 80s for forward-thinking and technology-driven education, as well as hands-on and innovative learning. It received scores in the mid-60s for producing stronger research and attracting global academic talent.

Its lowest score in this category — around 30 — was in medical research, reflecting the absence of a massive medical research ecosystem like those in Houston or Boston.

One of the most social and welcoming cities

The rankings suggest Austin’s strongest identity may be social rather than economic.

The city scored 90 for being friendlier and 89 for being easier to make friends in. It ranked in the mid-80s for hospitality, generosity and trust in strangers.

It also scored low in negative traits. Compared with other cities, the model was less likely to associate Austin with being boring, stingy or unfriendly.

Diversity and inclusion: strong on acceptance, average on diversity

The most nuanced results appeared in inclusion and diversity.

Austin scored in the 60s and 70s for LGBTQ+ acceptance, gender equality and inclusive policies. It received a 77 for social mobility and strong marks for being less discriminatory and more accepting overall.

In head-to-head comparisons, the model more often selected other cities as more racist.

However, Austin scored just 1 on diversity — suggesting it is viewed as roughly average among major U.S. cities, neither especially diverse nor notably lacking.

Attractive — and unconventional

Austin also scored in the 80s for attractiveness and being described as “sexy,” while ranking lower in negative physical traits such as being ugly or unhealthy.

The dataset also revealed some unusual associations, including stronger-than-average rankings in smell-related categories.

What the rankings mean

Because the results come from a language model trained on large amounts of internet text, they reflect how Austin is talked about and represented — not hard statistics on safety, wealth or demographics.

In other words, the rankings capture Austin’s reputation but not necessarily reality.