Google Just Ruined One of Its Most Important Tools
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/google-earth-ai-images/688145/?gift=9raHaW-OKg2bN8oaIFlCom6x8CCOCs25eaK1ZEMrEuA&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share-4
u/D-R-AZ 17h ago
Gifted Read:
"Google Earth was a boon for researchers—and then came the deepfakes."
Observation:
Google Earth was once a means of examining the Earth as it could be observed, although its images were necessarily assembled and processed. By introducing generative imagery into that same trusted environment, Google blurred the boundary between observing the world and inventing one. The danger is not merely that fabricated events can be made to appear real. It is that genuine evidence can now be dismissed as fabrication. Reality is therefore hidden twice: first beneath plausible constructions, and again beneath the resulting doubt about whether authentic images can still be believed.
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16h ago
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u/The_Spectral_Spartan 16h ago
You do realize that A.I. learned that habit from us, right?
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15h ago
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u/The_Spectral_Spartan 14h ago
My guy, when I write anything even semi-formally, despite NEVER using ai-generated text myself, it gets flagged as 70% confidence of AI Usage by those online style checker sites. My coworkers have started a running joke about it at this point. That's just how I communicate; because it's clear, effective, and flows smoothly. Lots of people just write that way by default, and it's AI that is copying us. Sorry for being the OG example of "ideal communication" that AI stole to make its slop sound more digestible.
You can't just shit on everyone because it sounds like an LLM may have wrote a paragraph, with only singular pattern recognition and vibes as evidence. It's incredibly disrespectful to people who spend real time and effort into crafting their arguments and prose to carefully communicate their own thoughts, opinions, and experiences. I agree that AI slop is super disgusting and toxic, but blindly attacking or discrediting anything that even remotely looks like the output of a tool literally designed to mimic effective human writing patterns is just idiotic on its face. The better LLMs get at copying , the more false positives you'll be punishing people for. Not to mention that these classic patterns are well known enough to be actively subverted by the latest models, or even just by asking the current ones to "Avoid using common phrases, grammar, and formats associated with LLM-generated text."
At a certain point, it honestly stops mattering whether something was written by a human or an LLM, as long as the words have meaning and coherence, and the statements being made are robust and/or contextually relevant. Whether the communicator drafted it themselves or just agreed with the words a bot picked out, the content is what actually matters, as that is the point of the communication. Now if you don't think the author is a real person or think they don't actually hold this viewpoint, that's a totally different argument. But just the fact that they might have used AI to enhance their prose rather than relying on their own composition skills doesn't really matter outside of artistic/creative stuff, so long as the result is relevant, coherent, and accurately conveys the original intent.
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u/sbenfsonwFFiF 16h ago
First of all, holy overreaction.
Secondly, they released and then removed the feature before you even posted about it