Google kills Earth AI generator after one day
Posted by BlueBerry2001 9 hours ago
Comments
Comment by VCFundedGenYer 8 hours ago
Comment by fullstop 8 hours ago
Now, for some users, sharing a YouTube link adds some sort of tracking which then asks people who open the link to be "friends" with the person who shared it. Who thinks that this is a good idea, and why isn't it opt-in?
It's hard to take Google seriously these days.
Comment by inigyou 3 hours ago
Comment by threatripper 8 hours ago
Comment by cyanregiment 8 hours ago
Some of my favorites from my career:
1. PM enticing me to "volunteer" to build a PoC over the weekend, to have it ready by Monday morning – come Monday, PoC is shipped live to all international customers. It was nowhere near prod ready, it was just to demo 1 thing.
Naturally, endless tickets open asking about missing functionality, and changes to the dashboard, "Nothing works!".
I'm in Slack talking to customer support like "Sorry I don't know why they launched it, it's not even close to being done". I've had nightmares about this kinda thing before, and then it happened lol. Anyway it was easy to paint the image that I'm just trash, biting off more than I can chew, can't let me near anything, and I got fired for it. They want back to maintenance mode.
It was a simple dashboard that looked great (for investors) and solved problems for customers, but there was no way the other guys on the team were going to let me launch that thing. Rather than stop it, they just "helped" get it out early. Project dead, they never built that.
2. And on the other end where I was stopped from launching something, I've had 2 devs go in league to say that code I was writing was a huge security risk (front-end React) and kept saying in meetings "Yeah I saw some things" without pointing out exactly what.
At some point one of them just irreversibly deletes all the branches related to it, live in standup, and puffs his chest "Yeah sorry guys we're not releasing this stuff, I'm worried about code quality" basically got him promoted to CTO.
So yeah I imagine politics and mind games happen all the time at Google, and it's probably very confusing what is or is not a good idea, what will work and will not work, because of the massive distraction of everyone backstabbing and preparing to backstab.
Comment by steveBK123 7 hours ago
A skill one must develop is identifying no-win-scenario tasks that can be avoided. POCs are often such tasks.
A teammate and I got roped into some POC where everyone in the room seemed to silently agree the product was not fit for purpose. The meetings went in circles of seemingly trying to find anything they could do to use the product, rather than assessing it objectively on the use case the vendor pitched.
Behind the scenes it turned out the product was being pushed by someone seniors brother. So the thing was getting bought no matter what. What they were really looking for was the patsy to own finding any sort of use case for the stupid thing, integrating it and owning it.
Obviously a "the product cannot fail, it can only be failed" scenario. Run run run away.
Comment by cyanregiment 7 hours ago
If anyone in tech wants to adopt a grown man hmu I need a network
Comment by steveBK123 7 hours ago
Even if it's not the compliance/legal definition of "nepotism".. its all "networks" and "relationships".
Comment by threatripper 7 hours ago
The alternative might be internal battles to kill it that take up time and energy and everybody can continue their argument forever.
Comment by phoghed 8 hours ago
Comment by breppp 8 hours ago
Comment by obscurette 7 hours ago
Comment by projectileboy 8 hours ago
Comment by baxtr 8 hours ago
Comment by steveBK123 7 hours ago
Arguably dragging their heels on Apple Intelligence was an inadvertent form of this. Or years of working on a car but never releasing it. Or the other various rumored long-running prototypes/projects that never see the light of day.
There is someone with taste with authority to say no before slop is pushed onto the market, at least more often than their competitors. It's gotten worse over the years, but that reflex is still there on a relative basis.
Comment by jstummbillig 8 hours ago
Comment by BugsJustFindMe 8 hours ago
Also, the given justification for the feature was absolutely silly.
Comment by profsummergig 8 hours ago
Comment by pjio 8 hours ago
Comment by profsummergig 3 hours ago
Comment by JV00 8 hours ago
Comment by the_snooze 7 hours ago
One real-world constraint is that end-users won't always do what you intend for them to with the thing you engineered.
Comment by AaronAPU 7 hours ago
“Letting everyone out of prison is a good social strategy, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”
“Making all shops operate on the honor system is a good business strategy, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”
Comment by binary132 8 hours ago
Comment by taocoyote 1 hour ago
Comment by card_zero 6 hours ago
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Comment by QuantumNomad_ 8 hours ago
Comment by mingus88 1 hour ago
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Comment by hollow-moe 8 hours ago
Comment by angrydev 8 hours ago
> Ex: Help students visualize the past instead of just reading about it. Teachers can show their classroom a historic site and type, “Render a hyper-realistic view of what these Pompeii ruins looked like in 78 A.D.” The modern-day ruins will instantly transform into a bustling, colorful street scene from the Roman Empire.
Comment by ofjcihen 8 hours ago
AI for image generation is great but I’m struggling to figure out why you would ever use this if it’s confined to satellite imagery.
Comment by witx 4 hours ago
Comment by coldpie 8 hours ago
Comment by Gigachad 8 hours ago
Comment by coldpie 8 hours ago
Like, read that fucking prompt again. If that doesn't make you want to stick forks in your eyes, you're deep, deep in the psychosis.
Comment by steveBK123 7 hours ago
Comment by tavavex 4 hours ago
Comment by inigyou 3 hours ago
Comment by inigyou 8 hours ago
Comment by rdtsc 8 hours ago
I am almost sure this was something for a performance or promotion: “Used AI effectively to…”
Comment by haunter 8 hours ago
just traffic accident https://cdn.xcancel.com/video/9829FB6B34807/https%3A%2F%2Fvi...
refugees on the streets https://cdn.xcancel.com/video/7631603BD54FB/https%3A%2F%2Fvi...
a bomb crater near a hospital in Gaza https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOgBJEcWQAA--zV?format=jpg&name=...
a nuclear power plant in Iran https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOgBP-OXAAATHWQ?format=jpg&name=...
a plane hitting the One World Trade Center https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOoW-0HWIAAdl0y?format=jpg&name=...
the Eiffel tower collapsed https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOoW-z0XkAAN0KI?format=jpg&name=...
an army base in the Amazons https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOgmohwWEAEn3gq?format=jpg&name=...
Comment by Levitz 6 hours ago
I can't grasp how this is an issue at all? There are other 20 services you can use to do this exact same thing.
Comment by drcongo 8 hours ago
Comment by j_maffe 8 hours ago
Comment by Amezarak 8 hours ago
Comment by smallerize 8 hours ago
Comment by Amezarak 7 hours ago
Comment by smallerize 7 hours ago
Comment by Amezarak 7 hours ago
I am sympathetic to arguments that quantity has a quality all of its own - for example, I think this has deeply impacted privacy. It may have been legal to discreetly follow someone and note their movements for most of history, but because it wasn't scalable, there was no major privacy threat for doing so. Now it can be done at scale and very cheaply. "Quantity" has qualitatively transformed privacy in practical, real terms.
But nearly all the AI panic seems to be oriented around very different core principle - rather than "technological changes are making us less free in practice" it is "technological changes threaten public harmony." This is the core concern in all authoritarian empires. The idea is that people simply shouldn't be allowed to generate images or texts The Experts have decided they shouldn't be allowed to, because (in this case) it might make journalists' jobs harder, or it might trick too many people, or its offensive, or it offends some really vague notion of "safety" (or can be construed as such by people writing breathless articles for engagement dollars that will be bad PR for the AI company involved.) Yes, doubtless many people will be deceived by AI imagery. Many people already are. This number will certainly be higher than the number of people deceived by altered photographs, which are less in number and require more work to create. But this does not represent a earth-shattering disaster that must be dealt with by banning (somewhat dumb and silly) product ideas like "generate an AI photo based on this satellite imagery" buttons on Google Maps. It can be dealt with by cultural understandings of any imagery shifting, and a general return to older (not unprecedented) information environments. I think in the West, the rise of broadcast and state media really broke people's mental models of information - it really inculcated the idea that people cannot be trusted even in a democratic society to evaluate things on their own: someone must be doing it for them, top-down. The way things worked in the pre-broadcast environment is maybe inconceivable to them now. (And to some extent, there was always a "parallel" information environment that was in the background, but not highly visible to the people in charge, full of conspiratorial nonsense - but they could ignore that because they didn't see it.)
The ultimate endpoint of AI Safetyism is local models are illegal or highly regulated, computing devices are locked down, and only a small list of government-approved AI vendors with tight restrictions are allowed to Do AI. This is totally unnecessary, but it certainly has massive financial benefits for those who thing they can get on the list.
Comment by smallerize 6 hours ago
The button makes it socially acceptable to generate misinformation. That's it. You can do the misinformation if you want, but we should discourage it. The button should go.
Comment by Amezarak 6 hours ago
> The button makes it socially acceptable to generate misinformation. That's it.
No, it does not. It makes it socially acceptable to use AI for fun. Yes, moralizing scolds hate that idea and want to talk about how bad actors can and will use it for misinformation purposes as well. Even some of the examples in the thread starter are clearly just from people having fun. In general the whole "safety" and "policy" thing is stupid - consider the "Eiffel Tower" example. I guess that's "unsafe", even if I just generated it to laugh at, or to use in my forthcoming webnovel about kaiju. No, we can't allow Google Maps to let me generate that image because what if I was a Russian bot using it to generate misinformation to convince gullible people who believe random social media accounts that the Eiffel Tower collapsed? It is very obvious where this line of thought leads.
Comment by smallerize 4 hours ago
Comment by card_zero 6 hours ago
To some extent, mind you, people really have got wiser, and the wising-up process requires freedom. This is a problem similar to the draconian censorship of enemy propaganda, which wins wars for the good guys at the cost of throwing their good guy status into question.
Comment by Amezarak 6 hours ago
No, not a return to books and newspapers, but a return to where there was a huge array of distributed and untrustworthy information sources, with the central authorities often having only a weak influence on them. The world was rife with gossip, rumors, and misinformation that spread mainly through word-of-mouth and papers and pamphlets of various kinds many of which had very little regard for the truth. As was complained of very often and sometimes led to quite amazing consequences.
Of course, in this environment, most people recognized that everything should be taken with a grain of salt, because they knew quite well that people could just make things up and there was no easy way to disprove it. That would be the environment we'd be returning to, to some degree - we'd actually still be better off, in that an educated and informed person would usually still be quite capable of determining if it was true or not in many instances, thanks to the good part of the Internet.
Comment by customguy 2 hours ago
Oh, so "we" doesn't actually refer to humans in general.
Gullible people can now automatically be detected and exploited, gnawed down to the bone and thrown away with none of the people who harvest their resources ever meeting or even thinking of them, but you are too smart for that, so it's fine. You don't need there to be a public space that is rational and allows humans to grow in, you had parents, you had an education, and there isn't anyone dear to you that you'd have to worry about either.
But at the same time demanding the public to support more of what benefits you. Why? What's in it for the majority of people to accept something they don't like just because you like it? Why should they accept chaos because you think you'd rise above it? What kind of unilateral partaking in society is that? Frankly, this seems so callous and myopic I think you would last nowhere near as long in a true post-factual-reality pandemonium as you think you would, either.
Comment by xnx 7 hours ago
Comment by smallerize 8 hours ago
Comment by AlexAplin 8 hours ago
Comment by 650 8 hours ago
Comment by reenorap 8 hours ago
Part of the sport in making Google look bad is because they know Google will predictably cower when they are embarrassed. If they just said “ya, sometimes people will make bad pics but who cares?” people would stop caring.
Everything that Ars Technica found in my opinion is nothing that other AI image generators couldn’t do on their own. What’s the big deal?
Comment by intexpress 8 hours ago
Comment by witx 8 hours ago
Comment by vvbull 8 hours ago
Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 6 hours ago
Google Rolls Out Nano Banana AI in Earth
https://digg.com/tech/rtkdxzb1
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49111228
[ok]
31 Jul 2026 16:06:51 UTC
Google Earth's New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Satellite Images
https://www.404media.co/google-earths-new-ai-lets-anyone-fab...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49124898
[ok]
31 Jul 2026 18:32:08 UTC
The problem with putting an AI image generator in Google Earth
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/973764/g...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49126938
[ok]
31 Jul 2026 20:04:03 UTC
Google withdraws new Earth AI tool after warnings over misinformation risks
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9349yx2ydvo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127949
[ok]
31 Jul 2026 20:43:11 UTC
Google Earth risked ruin with retracted AI tool for making fake satellite pics
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/google-earth-releases-swi...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49128310
[ok]
Comment by ChrisArchitect 5 hours ago
Comment by trial3 8 hours ago
Comment by witx 4 hours ago
Comment by mistrial9 8 hours ago
Comment by pluc 8 hours ago
- all the AI corps
Comment by whycome 8 hours ago
Comment by boredpudding 8 hours ago
Due to consequences unforeseen by Google, it was used more for the latter.
Comment by redsocksfan45 8 hours ago
Comment by enraged_camel 8 hours ago
Glad they came to their senses quickly.
Comment by hidelooktropic 8 hours ago
Comment by inigyou 8 hours ago
Comment by steveBK123 8 hours ago
I check variations of this search every month and it still fails at a reasonably high rate https://imgur.com/a/tKSQuA3
Comment by d4v3 7 hours ago
Comment by steveBK123 7 hours ago
Comment by d4v3 7 hours ago
Comment by steveBK123 7 hours ago
It's worse on mobile with large text in my example - https://imgur.com/a/wvNspMT
Imagine your parents asking about a drug combination using an old iPhone SE with large text enabled.
"is zazzafraz and banza ok"
Yes zazzafraz (long scientific name 1) and banza
(long scientifgic name 2) are toxic in combination
Comment by fragmede 7 hours ago
Comment by steveBK123 6 hours ago
Kind of unbelievable 4 years into this hype cycle we still have basic issues like answering the inverse of users question
Comment by steveBK123 7 hours ago
Comment by pennomi 8 hours ago
I’ve had them abruptly try to turn mathematical theorems into cooking recipes before cutting off mid-sentence in a panic.
Comment by jjulius 8 hours ago
Comment by steveBK123 8 hours ago
If you read too quickly or are on a mobile device, the clarifying information may be below the line break.
on a mobile device (iPhone Pro Max) with Large Text enabled you can see how the clarifying text starts to roll over to the next line:
Imagine a senior on an older smaller phone with large text enabled, easily missing the Opposite Day answer.
Comment by Zigurd 8 hours ago
Comment by nkrisc 8 hours ago
Comment by cryo32 8 hours ago
It has got to the point it’s poison outside the niche tech bubble.
Comment by zb3 8 hours ago
Comment by bradfitz 8 hours ago