Google Earth is the de facto record of our entire planet.
But today, the company undermined its own credibility with a dangerous new AI feature — and then quickly pulled it down after people started using it to generate blatant misinformation.
On Thursday, Google announced that it added an image generation tool straight into the web browser version of the app, allowing anyone to fabricate made-up satellite images of anywhere in the world.
It was clearly a misinformation disaster. The AI tool, powered by Google’s Nano Banana 2 model, could make a neighborhood look like it’d suffered aerial strikes, turn unsuspecting locales into a warzone, and depict a city as the site of a natural disaster.
