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Google Earth's new AI image generation function didn't survive a day after users deepfaked disasters
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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What was even the point of this; what was the intended use case?
Enabling property developers to view their buildings in a 3D space before building them? There's already far better tools for that.
It's easier for the news and the government to deepfake things like "huge mobs of Mexican narcoterrorists just over the border" or "there's a nuclear missile silo in Iran" or whatever with this.
It's weird to make it public if that's the case.
Nah, that just helps to normalize it and let people think it's just harmless and fun.
Or erode all trust in imagery so when something real and terrible comes out no one believes it.
Don’t look up!
In large organizations when the order comes down from on high that 'we are all in on whatever' AI in this case, middle managers and product owners start looking for ways to ram that thing into their product so they can keep playing the game.
So it's just another solution in search of a problem basically?
That's the whole story from the beginning. It's not good and trustworthy enough for the real work but they've poured all that money in there so it needs to be used.
Isn't this really the only valid reason for any AI image generation? Things I've AI image generated: 1) Godzilla riding a Unicycle B) Godzilla taking a math test #) Godzilla fixing a printer iv) Godzilla roasting a marshmallow with his breath V) My corporate logo with Godzilla attacking superimposed. None of the above is a joke.
I AM FUCKING TIRED OF THIS SHIT YOU WANT THE REAL REASON WE CREATED AI? Rick and Morty needed to run for millions of years but the actors, artists and creators would all be dead. So we created AI to immortalize them so they would make Rick and Morty for a million years.
AI is unintentionally hilarious. The biggest problem is that the humor rarely translates to others, so it's sort of just a joke for you to enjoy and then throw away.
And we're destroying the environment for it
I wonder how it compares to meat consumption, personal vehicles, air conditioning, cheap manufacturing in poorer countries, fast fashion, the internet and its infrastructure...
I'm glad to see people talking about the environment, but I have no idea how AI usage compares to other things that are destroying the environment.
In my case, I use a locally hosted stable diffusion setup, so it's not even running 99.9% of the time. Turn it on, ask for the thing, turn it off again. Fans are spinning for a minute. A single session of any AAA game is worse.
Nice. I once asked for a picture of Godzilla giving a speech at the UN.
I work in this space: you can use it to mock up commercial developments, changes in land use, etc., to see what it would look like. Somewhat useful when presenting rather dry architectural diagrams into realistic looking scenes.
Now, why it was broadly opened to the public is unclear to me other than being a flex?
Fair, but aren't there better solutions for this already?
Depends on how you define “better.” You can generate many variants of a scene this way, at night say, or in snowy conditions. You can mock up emergency response situations. It’s part of the story you’re telling but not a straight up replacement.
I suppose better in this case means accurate.
Unless you just need the image to be off to the side of a PowerPoint presentation and no one's really supposed to pay any attention to it I can't really see how I could rely on an AI to produce an output that I want.
I guess by better I mostly mean "without AI"
Machines should work. Humans should think.
Seems to imply people don't use Ai to shortcut their thinking and people don't think when they work.
The quote comes from long before this age of LLMs. We need robots (which do not spy on us) to wash our dishes and fold our laundry, freeing us to think and create.
Generally agree, especially non-spying, but the context here is generative ai. So if I misunderstood the message, I'd be curious to know how.
i'll take a shot.
education: these are the pyramids of giza. this is what they used to look like.
real eatate: generate an image of how the development of somethjng would look
business: generate a map with detaled renederings of all their locations.
I wouldn't take a plausible-but-not-accurate result for any of these applications
There's also a big push internally to add AI features to their products. I don't think this was some shadowy push to discredit satellite imagery (to help Israel I guess?) - the more mundane explanation that this was a poorly conceived feature thought up by some team internally to meet business demands unfortunately rings far more likely to me.
I would prefer to have human generated images in all those cases, education needs to be accurate or it's not worth it, I don't want the AI interpreting what the pyramids used to look like I want a render based on archaeologists analysis. A new development will have a particular look, in order for the image to be useful it has to be an accurate representation of the building, an AI will just put something generic there.
But all those resources already exist without AI.