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Nano Banana 2 removed from Google Earth
- mimischi 2mo agoIs this the fastest Google has killed one of its own products (features)?
- eichin 2mo agoEven the Microsoft Kin lasted 48 days (I thought it had been cancelled on launch day, but digging back it was just the tech press saying "This was a mistake from Day One" which is certainly true, but not the same thing :-)
- dgrin91 2mo agoTay lasted 16 hours. Depending on how long Nano banana was live here (unclear from the article) it might have been shorter.
- sunaookami 2mo agoThey have announced a mobile app for AI Studio but now they removed it before it even launched so... ;) https://9to5google.com/2026/07/31/gemini-ai-studio-app/ https://9to5google.com/2026/07/31/gemini-ai-studio-app/
- Ancalagon 2mo agoWhy does Google Earth need anything remotely related to AI image gen?
- chedabob 2mo agoA Product Manager in some AI-adjacent department needs a promotion.
- netsharc 2mo ago"Google career progression: shipped a feature this quarter [x]"... Ah, box-ticking your way to oblivion...
- walrus01 2mo agoIt doesn't. Whoever is above the Nano Banana 2 team at Google is pushing some agenda that forcibly integrates their AI slop image generator into other teams' products.
- ncr100 2mo agoDoes this move us closer to needing registries of authentic images? (White-listing? Only a partial solution.) Google's response today, in addition to removing nano banana from Earth, was that people should just use Google's synthID(?) AI detection app, to determine if this is a blacklisted (effectively) image. Of course that's impractical because a million people could quickly receive the image .. the image would make an impression on them before detection. And, this would also mean that Google's AI detection software needs to be ran by every human for every image that they view, in order to determine if it's valid. So, let's say that's 100 images, so that's a 100 to the millionth power? (Did I really get a CS degree?) I think it's just 100 million visits to Google synthID tool.. lol. If we go with a white listing approach then we know that we should trust the image. If we go with a blacklisting approach then we only know that we should not trust the image, which we already knew before we ran the tool.... - https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-plant-a-nuclear-plant-in-iran https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-plant-a-nuclear-plan... original article is more interesting, also linked in above main article
- xtajv 2mo agoI've toyed with the idea of issuing LTE IMEI-like identity numbers for digital cameras (and a LTE IMSI/SIM-like identity number to identify a paying accountholder who wishes to subscribe to an image-creator attestation service). Each photograph would attach cryptographically-verifiable metadata attesting to both the identity of the camera and the person who owns it. (Say, m="Camera 123 owned by subscriber 456 created a raw 20MP image with sha 0xdeadbeef... at time 2026-01-23 4:56pm" countersigned by both the device and subscriber keys). Image compression would be an immediate issue. Key lifetime management would be another major issue, as would key revocation behavior. Device manufacturers would take time to buy in and phase in hardware support. Consumers would object to yet another subscription service. Privacy and freedom-of-the-press advocates would probably have something to say about establishing a norm where we doubt the legitimacy of any digital images that refuse to "out" their creator. And other than those pesky little non-starters, I've yet to find anything wrong with it :'-) (see also: Schneier's Law)
- r721 2mo ago
- SwellJoe 2mo agoThere are a lot of things reasonable people would use AI for. This is not one of them. This is a crazy idea. Just plain bonkers. No sense to be found. "Oh, you want to see what's at that location? How about we make something up for you?"
- paxys 2mo agoYeah this has “PM trying to put an AI release on their promo packet” written all over it.
- ashleyn 2mo agoThey could've done a lot more interesting things with AI in Google Earth though. Think planning a travel itinerary, or plaintext search of a POI. I was just using Earth to plan an irrigation setup in my backyard, would've been damn nice to have MCP there to generate paths and circular regions illustrating coverage.
- chrisandchris 2mo agoWhat I find interesting - and seems absolutely logic for such a large company - that it's fine for a group of people to work on something tha is clearly to fail from Day 1, and it just seems to be ok.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- serf 2mo agoI didn't use the feature, so I don't know if it was capable of this, but the thing you describe sounds potentially useful for land developers or folks trying to conceptualize buildings/city-development. the people who make those stupid renders of yet-to-be-built strip malls filled with people and live bands that they use to sell development plans to city commerce groups.
- g42gregory 2mo agoWhen they talk about everybody losing their jobs, that doesn’t bother them one bit. In fact, they seem to be truly happy when they talk about that. But this, Oh No!
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 2mo agoRelated earlier: Google Earth's New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Satellite Images https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49124898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49124898
- rossant 2mo agoI can't wait for nano banana on pathology images.
- snvzz 2mo agoCensorship is now being called `guardrails`.
- nc55g3g 2mo ago"Trusted view of the world" but you could make bomb craters in Gaza. SynthID watermark doesn't fix that.
- Jamesbeam 2mo agoA man cannot have fun any more these days. Is allowing a man to generate corn circles to send conspiracy theorists on a wild goose chase through the UK for the weekend really too much to ask for?
- bko 2mo ago> Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. What on earth is Google doing? Check my latest post here: We're back to nerfing Google's products because "safety". Yes, you can obviously do this stuff, like you can obviously use Excel to open up a financial statement, change some numbers and tweet about it. The obvious answer, and I believe it's already being utilized, is watermarks. There's been a lot of research in creating imperceptible, unremovable fingerprints from the generated image. Think very subtle statistical patterns in the generated pixels. Instead we're going to get some long prompt about how not to do bad things that steps all over the user's intent. https://x.com/henkvaness/status/2082912544394498228?s=20 https://x.com/henkvaness/status/2082912544394498228?s=20
- mysterydip 2mo agoUnless the watermark is a giant “This is fake” diagonally across the center of the image, everything will get shared virally in the 3 second attention span of doomscrolling without a second look.
- zb3 2mo agoWe already have open source image editing models, so how is this Google fault? This is UGC.. If I type something nefarious in Google search bar and then share that screenshot, is Google to blame for not even refusing rendering that text inside the input field?
- varun_ch 2mo agoWhat is an AI image generator inside Google Earth useful for if not generating believable but fake images that look like they’re from Google Earth?
- zb3 2mo agoThat's a separate issue - of course it's only so that someone at google can tick a box "I've shipped an AI feature" to get promoted. But we didn't gain any new ability to produce fake images, fake images can already be produced easily, even those that pretend they're from Google Earth. This was already possible, so I don't understand the concern here.. Are tech companies now responsible for everything the user does? That would end with total enslavement, don't go in that direction.
- iamleppert 2mo agoMaybe LLMs will be the final nail in the coffin for putting every little ounce of every little article behind an annoying paywall. A world model that ingests data in real-time from every flock camera, every iPhone, and every Rayban meta spy glasses won't have any need for journalists.