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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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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.
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.
Edit: I want to make it clear that I'm not defending Google or the team that made this feature here. This is awful, and they should have seen it coming. But falling into conspiracies and looking for the man behind the curtain just leads to overlooking the mundane people who just follow orders or fail to consider the impact and ethics of their actions. We can't reach these people (or consider these lessons for ourselves) if we talk past them (especially if they dismiss criticism as coming from it off touch conspiratists).
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.
I wouldn't take a plausible-but-not-accurate result for any of these applications
But all those resources already exist without AI.