GoKawiilTL;DR Yesterday, Google announce that Google Earth was getting Nano Banana 2 image generation.
The company is now pressing pause on the feature, citing policy violations.
Google plans to bring it back after stricter guardrails are in place.
Playing around generating images with AI is a whole lot of fun… up until it isn’t. At some point, someone’s going to make a particularly controversial image, or maybe try to pass off a fake as the real thing, or even just rip off a real artist’s work. Yesterday, Google announced it was bringing Gemini’s Nano Banana 2 image generation to Google Earth to make it easy to create imaginative landscapes based on real-world locations, and now it’s already finding itself forced to backtrack.
Over on X, Google’s official news account has issued a statement: We know that people uniquely trust Google Earth for a reliable view of the world. We’ve seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we’ve also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we’re rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails. It’s important to note that generated images didn’t appear in the main Google Earth experience for others to see and were watermarked as AI generated. Google hasn’t shared anything more specific about the policy violations it uncovered, nor what exactly it intends for these stronger guardrails to block. The company changing its mind about features is hardly unheard of for Google, but the extremely compressed timetable we’re looking at here is definitely a little out of the ordinary.
Admittedly, while both Google Earth and Google Maps tap into geospatial data, Earth has much more of a reputation as a professional tool, and we can appreciate how suddenly introducing a feature to generate fantastical images feels more than a little off-brand.
If you had the chance to give Nano Banana in Google Earth a spin during its brief existence, let us know what you thought of your experience down in the comments. Hopefully the rest of us will have a chance to try it for ourselves soon.
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