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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.
The AI integration left open source intelligence analysts, who heavily rely on the accurate satellite imagery to monitor areas and in particular conflict zones, especially baffled.
Hank Van Ess, one such OSINT researcher, reported on his Substack that he used Google Earth’s AI to place refugees near the Mexican border and put a nuclear plant in Iran. Both images could easily be used to fuel certain far-right narratives.
“What on earth is Google doing?” Van Ess pondered. Part of the danger, he noted, lies in Google’s own boast that the AI integration “creates concepts grounded in the real world.”
“Grounded in the real world means the invented thing is welded to genuine coordinates, drawn on genuine imagery, often in the same colours and the same light and at the same angle as the picture beside it,” he wrote. “The forgery does not have to look convincing on its own. It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on.”
In our own tests, we found that the Google Earth AI would respond to a request to make a rural Pennsylvanian town look like it suffered a drought that caused dead crops and forest fires. The resulting image was fairly realistic, with huge plumes of smoke blowing over the area.
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