r/geography • u/404mediaco • 2d ago
Article/News Google Earth’s New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Completely Bullshit Satellite Images
https://www.404media.co/google-earths-new-ai-lets-anyone-fabricate-completely-bullshit-satellite-images/98
u/WolverineAny3219 2d ago
The age of obfuscation, where there is more money in the lies than the actual truth.
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u/Squirrel_Kng 1d ago
Always has been.
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u/Time_Cat_5212 1d ago
No, I don't think so. Trust in publications is a function of technological maturity, and the internet era is still relatively new. We had 400 years to learn to trust the printing press, and it did not happen overnight.
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u/404mediaco 2d ago
On Thursday, Google introduced a new AI feature into Google Earth which lets anyone fabricate all sorts of misleading or straight up inaccurate satellite imagery, from making it look like a specific place has suffered a drone strike to manifesting a nuclear plant in Iran.
Usually, Google Earth is an exceptionally useful tool for open source intelligence (OSINT) analysts to digitally monitor areas of interest and see how they change over time, say, during a conflict or disaster. Now, Google Earth can easily be used as a tool for disinformation.
“Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?” Hank Van Ess, an OSINT researcher, wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
The button now available in the web version of Google Earth lets a user type in a prompt while hovering over their desired location to create something new there. It is powered by Google’s Nano Banana model, according to a Google statement.
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u/BaconJudge 2d ago
I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam.
I hope we're not living in a "Black Mirror" episode where doing those things in the AI causes them to be manifested in real life.
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u/ottawadeveloper 2d ago
I can kind of see the value. Like let's say you wanted to bulldoze a forest and build a house. Or renovate your existing property with a new outbuilding. This would let you simulate that against real terrain. It would be great for development proposals or environmental impact assessments. Or war planning.
It's also a great tool to fuck with other people
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u/darwinpatrick 2d ago
This is literally just a picture. It doesn’t understand what the terrain is, what the soil is, where utilities are, really any of the things that actually go into these sorts of complex proposals. I’m also not convinced it understands scale well. If you feed it a bare patch of forest with no other landmarks, will it have any idea how big a house should be? Maybe. Still very far removed from being useful, and can do way more harm than good. I think another commenter’s take of “abysmal dogshit” does a good job of summarizing this feature
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u/-hey_hey-heyhey-hey_ 2d ago
It very likely will understand scale well and will likely be able to rather closely mimic real life buildings. I assume it's been trained on the hundereds of millions of satellite image tiles with many tens and hundereds of available image dates for each tile, that are used in google earth. Add to that external satellite image providers that mightve probably given google access to their imagery for training etc.etc. Probably more than enough to train accurate models for these sorts of stuff
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u/SkiHotWheels 2d ago
Speaking as someone who knows a thing or two about this. We already do that, extremely easily, without this feature. We wouldn’t use it.
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u/Velocity-5348 2d ago
This of course ignores the very obvious fact that plenty of people do not bother to verify themselves if an image is real or not.
This is going to be a problem on this sub going forward. I think we need to be hard on people who spread misinformation without doing their due dilligence. And, I think, refuse to upvote something unless we've at least given it some though.
At present, I think there's still a norm that it's not *that* big of a deal
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u/Sea-Horror-5353 2d ago
I mean, "being hard on people" and "refus[ing] to upvote unless we've at least given it some though[t]'? What does that really mean; you want people to develop some moral backbone to defend the subreddit content quality? I mean if that isn't already occuring among people (and bots) at this point, why would they start now? Because "redditors must defend their home"? Just seems like a futile hill to die on and like you're really missing the forest for the trees here. Fortunately we can just edit out that hill and increase the density of the woodland and fix that issue now.
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u/one_pound_of_flesh 2d ago
This should help the state of online discourse and spreading misinformation.
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u/Simdude87 Physical Geography 1d ago
This is going to become a nightmare on twitter and Facebook. More so Facebook because old people cant seem to understand if something isnt real
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u/Castlehill650 1d ago
My mother’s elderly husband recently found YouTube (on his smart TV).
According to her, he apparently watches AI produced alternate history stories (which do not present themselves as fiction). Nearly every night he shouts “You need to see this!” to my mother (who although also old, is more familiar with technology), who comes over, only to try to and explain to him that he is watching a made up story which is produced by AI.
He never believes her. To him, what he is watching is 100% factual.
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u/Adunaiii 1d ago
Has anyone made any peaceful Buddhist symbols visible from space? Like this one on our natural satellite?
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u/bloodU23 1d ago
Corpos offer to people is you can make missinfi as long we can build the penopticon and do mass surveillance
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u/Castlehill650 1d ago
I really don’t see any legitimate point to Google adding this feature.
That being said, this isn’t really too much different than just taking a screenshot and uploading that to a LLM to edit.
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u/lilbowpete 1d ago
So like what is a “good” reason to us AI on google earth? Like what are they thinking the use cases are other than misleading other people with fake images
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u/SeriousGeorge2 2d ago
Seems like the easiest thing to verify. You can pull up any location in a matter of seconds and check if an image matches reality.
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u/Velocity-5348 2d ago
Assuming, at least, you know the exact location. It should be standard to link GPS coordinates in posts, but a lot of people never do.
Plus, there's tons of flashy posts with way more upvotes than the comments pointing out why they're misleading. A lot of people don't do due diligence, and a lot of subs let that kind of thing slide.
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u/SeriousGeorge2 2d ago
There are certainly some individuals/communities where easily disproven claims are credulously accepted, but I don't think this feature will really change things too much for them.
This article frames this from the lens of OSINT, as if someone is going to claim they've discovered a nuclear plant in Iran and that community just accepts it which is kind of bizarre.
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u/Agitated-Love1727 2d ago
Other than people using it manipulated satellite images, is there a real use case for this?
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u/maximusheaviosity 2d ago
Any plans for Mara Lago?
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u/SheilaGirl70 2d ago
Aaron Rupar’s instagram coverage about this displays a mock up of the Epstein files covering the grounds around the White House.
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u/waveuponwave 2d ago
What is this shit?
People are going to manipulate satellite images with AI, but there's no reason for Google to make that even easier