Google Earth can now bomb Gaza · ↗ www.digitaldigging.org
Maybe encouraging people to fake satellite imagery is a bad idea
Henk van Ess of the Digital Digging Substack has a post about a new, astonishingly poorly thought-out feature in Google Earth: a built-in prompt that lets users doctor real satellite imagery with AI (specifically, Google’s Nano Banana 2 image model).
Van Ess demonstrates some of the obvious abuses Google Earth is all too happy to generate: “[refugee swarms]” near the Mexican border, a bomb crater next to a hospital in Gaza, a car accident in Amsterdam, and a nuclear plant in Iran. Some Twitter users have come up with even more, uh, creative uses for the feature.
Very little self-reflection appears to have gone into the launch announcement for the feature, which became available to anyone for free on July 30. “Sometimes it’s fun to let your imagination run wild,” reads the blog post.
Yeah, sometimes it’s fun to make it even easier to flood the internet with fabricated satellite images purporting to show war crimes or whatever subject will inflame the public imagination this week. I love subsidizing the slop tsunami crowding out any semblance of a shared understanding of the world.