I wonder why google would want a service that makes it harder to discern what satellite images of bombed out homes are real or fake, and why they would want this kind of program to be publically accessible.

It was cancelled though.

I hate AI, and I love maps. If I had to use AI, this would be the most tolerable way. My emails to the local traffic engineering department would get a lot more spicy! Thankfully we have GIMP so I don't have to kill the earth to make satellite photos.

I said it before, this is the perfect tool to cause confusion and plausible deniability, released just as the US and Israel is mounting losses of military bases and equipment fror their illegal wars and invasions all over the Middle East.

Paywalled

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Area 51?

Fortunately they removed it a day later.

Google is run my by assholes and idiots. Break it apart.

Edit: fixed silly typo

This is old news; backlash was immediate and the "feature" was rescinded.

It might have been that plan all along, but now you can't tell someone to just google it. You can't believe google results anymore.

Don't even understand what this AI feature was even supposed to be for. I'm certainly not going to rely on an AI to annotate satellite imagery. This was always just a stupid marketing thing with no real purpose behind it.

For all of Google's faults, which of course are numerous, they do have some really talented engineers working for them, and it's just a shame that their time is constantly wasted on crap like this rather than on useful features that people would actually benefit from.

wow...! people is using a feature that allows you to modify the appearance of a location anywhere on earth to add craters to places!! truly an unforseeable tragedy.

Those are balls.

This close, they always look like landscape. But nope, you're looking at balls.

Nano banana!

I mean, it does seem fun. I don't want to turn it off. But maybe insert a hash into the image that makes it clear it's fake

Eh, this one's fixable, because you only have a few sources of legit imagery, and it's all contemporary and digital. Just have Google Earth render the image server-side and add a cryptographic signature to any legit satellite images that someone saves.

You can have AI-generated satellite imagery and image-is-proof satellite images coexisting. Can't do that for most images, but for this particular niche, you can.

Google's solution to images altered with their AI: just use their AI to determine if they're fake.

There's a little problem though: people who assume it's real won't get told. Not even through their own AI. I downloaded the fake protest picture and asked, using the persona of someone naive.

Then I asked if it was real. Only then did it bother to check:

So Google will only fulfill their promise if you yourself act as a skeptic at all times. I love the erosion of trust online, as pushed by major tech companies.