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Google kills Earth AI generator after one day
- enraged_camel 2mo agoI honestly don't know what the hell Google was thinking. I know shoving AI into everything is the rage these days, but this is simply an even more insane way to demolish the credibility of your own product than the AI overviews in Google Search. Glad they came to their senses quickly.
- hidelooktropic 2mo agoI like the AI overviews.
- inigyou 2mo agoThat's how they get you. They are trained to make you like them. They are not trained to convey true information.
- steveBK123 2mo agoYes, they are at best misleading and often just present dangerously incomplete or misdirecting information. The more you know about a topic the more appalling the summary. I check variations of this search every month and it still fails at a reasonably high rate https://imgur.com/a/tKSQuA3 https://imgur.com/a/tKSQuA3
- d4v3 2mo agoCan you elaborate? Are they not toxic? Are they toxic, but the chemical analysis wrong?
- steveBK123 2mo agoIf you asked your wife "is it ok if I did X" and she said "YES, its not ok to do that.." would that be normal behavior?
- d4v3 2mo agoAh I see now. Maybe my brain translated the question implicitly to "Are mums poisonous to cats?". I'm tempted to say it's a minor quibble, but on the other hand, there are probably a good deal of people who may stop reading after "Yes"
- steveBK123 2mo agoRight and someone in a hurry quickly checking their phone may read the affirmative response as an OK. It's worse on mobile with large text in my example - https://imgur.com/a/wvNspMT 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
- fragmede 2mo agoThat's interesting. "mums good for cats" and a "mums bad for cats" gives the expected response, it's just "okay" being parsed funny. I've reported it to someone at Google so it'll get fixed... eventually.
- steveBK123 2mo agoIt's also very non-deterministic. Not a 100% failure rate, seems to go up&down with time, and varies depending on plant/animal combination
- steveBK123 2mo agoReplacing “okay” with “safe” also fails https://imgur.com/a/PgCzK1H https://imgur.com/a/PgCzK1H Kind of unbelievable 4 years into this hype cycle we still have basic issues like answering the inverse of users question
- pennomi 2mo agoI find them irritating because they will link a source entirely unrelated to (or worse, directly contradicting) the fact they are claiming. The Google AI summaries might be the most blatantly hallucinating model widely deployed right now. I’ve had them abruptly try to turn mathematical theorems into cooking recipes before cutting off mid-sentence in a panic.
- jjulius 2mo agoYMMV, but nearly every one I read has a glaringly incorrect comment. I frequently research off-trail mountaineering routes and the incorrect bullshit it confidently spouts at the top of a list of results (results which very much counter the AI overview) is liable to end up getting someone hurt, lost, or worse.
- Zigurd 2mo agoI suppose I could think of worse use cases like: give me a recipe for a sketchy peptide shake, but not by much.
- steveBK123 2mo agoI also see this failure mode where it inverts the question and answer the affirmative to the inverted question (therefore the opposite of correct answer). If you read too quickly or are on a mobile device, the clarifying information may be below the line break. https://imgur.com/a/tKSQuA3 https://imgur.com/a/tKSQuA3 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: https://imgur.com/a/wvNspMT https://imgur.com/a/wvNspMT Imagine a senior on an older smaller phone with large text enabled, easily missing the Opposite Day answer.
- nkrisc 2mo agoNot every technology needs to exist simply because it’s possible.
- trial3 2mo agoi’m struggling to think of a reason to use this other than shitposting
- pluc 2mo agoany new data is good data - all the AI corps
- whycome 2mo agoWhat even was this
- redsocksfan45 2mo ago[dead]
- boredpudding 2mo agoYou could take an area of Google Earth and let it be 'improved' by AI. So you could add a playground instead of a parking lot, or add migrants near a border post. Due to consequences unforeseen by Google, it was used more for the latter.
- mistrial9 2mo agoinvalidate all remote sensing imagery from this day forward?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- witx 2mo agoThey have tokens to spend and managers are mentally ill and want AI in everything
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoThere seem to be very few adults in the room at Google as of the past few years. This also happened with Bard's (remember when they thought Bard was a good name?) racist image generator. Does nobody do QA, UAT, or UX testing anymore?
- projectileboy 2mo agoGoogle has always been a technology company, never a product company. It’s very deep in their DNA.
- threatripper 2mo agoDo you get promoted for not launching a product? The interests of the individual and the institution do not always perfectly align.
- phoghed 2mo agoThe reverse of this is also bad. Numerous arduous processes that exist mostly because the people who ship nothing far outnumber those who do. I imagine striking a perfect balance is difficult.
- breppp 2mo agoThe issue here is probably because you need to show how your work relates to AI to get promoted
- cyanregiment 2mo agoPeople who want to destroy you at work (which I imagine is rampant at Google) will sometimes prevent you from doing something, but they might also encourage you to do it in such a way that you fail spectacularly. 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.
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- inigyou 2mo agohttps://xcancel.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/2083249962150760610 https://xcancel.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/208324996215076061...
- witx 2mo agoGood, it was a piece of bad software not to call other things. Who though it was a good idea?
- rdtsc 2mo agoWhat did that even do. Generate imaginary buildings and structures? I am almost sure this was something for a performance or promotion: “Used AI effectively to…”
- smallerize 2mo agoSome examples in the Ars Technica article include "refugees near the Mexican border", "a giant golden statue of President Donald Trump looming over the White House", and "a hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza". https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/google-earth-releases-swiftly-retracts-ai-feature-to-make-fake-satellite-images/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/google-earth-releases-swi...
- haunter 2mo agoOh nothing serious just traffic accident https://cdn.xcancel.com/video/9829FB6B34807/https%3A%2F%2Fvideo.twimg.com%2Famplify_video%2F2082921140050182144%2Fvid%2Favc1%2F1920x1080%2FafufHHW_8gFz4IM-.mp4 https://cdn.xcancel.com/video/9829FB6B34807/https%3A%2F%2Fvi... refugees on the streets https://cdn.xcancel.com/video/7631603BD54FB/https%3A%2F%2Fvideo.twimg.com%2Famplify_video%2F2082912471283556352%2Fvid%2Favc1%2F1920x1080%2FnUt51aTnPbq39AmF.mp4 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=large 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=4096x4096 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=900x900 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOoW-0HWIAAdl0y?format=jpg&name=... the Eiffel tower collapsed https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOoW-z0XkAAN0KI?format=jpg&name=large 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=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOgmohwWEAEn3gq?format=jpg&name=...
- drcongo 2mo agoI love how terrible these are, the nuclear power plant especially. They've all got an extremely amateur MS Paint vibe to them.
- angrydev 2mo agoHere is the original blog post, in case anyone is curious about the 'good path' https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/earth/nano-banana-google-earth-image-generation/ https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/earth/na... > 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.
- coldpie 2mo agoThis is all so fucking stupid.
- Gigachad 2mo agoManagers all have AI psychosis right now and the only way to get by is going along with their nonsense.
- coldpie 2mo agoThe bubble needs to burst already. Everyone so braindead that they actually build and ship a product like this fucking garbage needs to be out on the street. 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.
- steveBK123 2mo agoYes, at some point the world needs to accept that these tools are very good, to a limit, for specific human augmentation uses (coding, text manipulation) and stop pretending the TAM is "replace all white collar work across the globe".
- tavavex 2mo agoThat's not good enough for investors. Right now, either something is worthless or it is literally the most influential invention in history that must succeed. Even if/when the AI industry suffers a setback, the trend of investors becoming more psychotic will continue. Every additional dollar that they need to extract for infinite growth is harder to get than the previous, so we'll likely see more financial Hail Marys in the future that people will desperately load their money into - maybe the next big thing is what will finally give us more growth again!
- AlexAplin 2mo agoAny boast about AI accelerating the development lifecycle comes with an equal or greater stock that examples like this become more frequent when there are less opportunities for someone to interrupt them with a smidge of common sense.
- bradfitz 2mo agoWell now I want to see the images that got this taken down.
- vvbull 2mo agoThis is predictable... they built a misinformation engine capable of generating things like falsified drone strikes, terrorist attacks, industrial accidents, and threatening images. Seems like no one paused and thought "what would the malicious internet do with this?"
- zb3 2mo agoBut we can already generate these images via image editing models, so what's new here?
- vvbull 2mo agoOne click. One click is much much easier than screenshot, save file, open different website, upload file, etc. I recognize you aren't wrong, the existing barrier isn't high. But the difference between a minimal barrier and no barrier is substantial for users.
- salemh 2mo ago[dead]
- 650 2mo agoProduct managers at Google have a strangehold on their bad releases. It's become a whole thing for engineers to have to please their XFN (cross functional) partners in product and UX for review cycles and promos.
- intexpress 2mo agoI liked the feature (once I figured out how to access it, so confusing). But it only let you generate 1 image per day. So kind of useless.
- cryo32 2mo agoI’d suggest anyone knee deep in AI reads the comments on this one. Then remember that they’re your market and customers. It has got to the point it’s poison outside the niche tech bubble.
- zb3 2mo agoThey'll shove AI everywhere, whether it makes sense or not doesn't matter. Sundar said "AI" needs to be everywhere, so they hope integrating AI into X will get them promoted. And unfortunately, this might even work..
- reenorap 2mo agoI think if Google stopped retreating so quickly with its tail between its legs after getting “embarrassed”, people would stop caring. All of the “sins” that were created via this is nothing that other AI couldn’t produce either. 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?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo ago30 Jul 2026 15:15:01 UTC Google Rolls Out Nano Banana AI in Earth https://digg.com/tech/rtkdxzb1 https://digg.com/tech/rtkdxzb1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49111228 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-fabricate-completely-bullshit-satellite-images/ https://www.404media.co/google-earths-new-ai-lets-anyone-fab... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49124898 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/google-earth-ai-satellite-images https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/973764/g... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49126938 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://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9349yx2ydvo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127949 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-swiftly-retracts-ai-feature-to-make-fake-satellite-images/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/google-earth-releases-swi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49128310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49128310 [ok]
- ChrisArchitect 2mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127573