Google Earth's AI makeover survives less than one planetary rotation Google performed a remarkably brisk reverse ferret last week, launching AI image generation in Google Earth and yanking it the next day after certain sections of the internet did the inevitable. This is how it began: "Today we're bringing AI image generation with Nano Banana to Google Earth, letting you virtually reimagine …
Well, we know who they voted for.
That trust by visitors to the remoter parts of Australia has drawn comments from more than one Coroner.
Out in the vastness of the Australian outback they say you are drawn closer to God. Doubtless but perhap faster and not quite in the way you had envisaged.
That is an understatement. I just searched (not asked) "planet with orbital period two days", and it answered first "there is none in the solar system", even when I uses "-solar" "-sun" -Venus" and so on no useful result.
Only when I entered "I am not talking about the solar system or venus, you idiot" into the AI chat it offered extrasolar planets. Four candidates with "two days" orbit. A google search check, with results from science.nasa.gov revealed: Only one of those four is correct. Last sentence I wrote into the AI chat was: "Kepler-407b is wrong. HAT-P-23b is wrong. WASP-43b is wrong. TOI-2267 d is the only right answer. You suck."
The google-AI is even too stupid to google-check its own results.
https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanet-catalog/kepler-407-b/
https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanet-catalog/hat-p-23-b/
https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanet-catalog/wasp-43-b/
https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanet-catalog/toi-2267-d/
The intent was probably to get the project manager a good review. Imagine yourself, a lowly project manager, are stuck on the Google Earth project. What are you to do to get that sweet, sweet "exceeds expectations" in your review? Without that, you're stuck on this project for at least another trip around the Sun (our sun, Sol, to be clear). To get a good review, you've gotta show you're all in on that AI stuff.
And thus: here we are. GenAI wedged into something that doesn't need it (at best) and is actively harmful (more likely).
To hyperfocus on an unimportant part of your comment, "Without that, you're stuck on this project for at least another trip around the Sun (our sun, Sol, to be clear)." Why does that make it clearer? I've seen the Latin name thing in a bunch of sci-fi, but it always seemed pointless to me, since we don't call other glowy heavy fusion things suns, at least not usually, we call them stars. It made even less sense when several authors decided to always refer to Earth as Terra, as if Earth had been made a generic name for "planet", while never using it as such and all the non-Earth planets having their own recognizable name anyway.
I have check the historic images if google earth for shadows at various day and year times. Why? Placement of solar panels, and checking for places where they should not be 'cause evil evil neighbour house chimney...
Apart from that: I did mention larger than personal projects as well, hm?
Genuinely curious: what was the intent behind this?
Showing the hellscape of Coventry for what it is - by having the AI show giant, man-eating, mutant cockroaches on the map, alongside the burning wreckage of the horrible concrete city centre!
Haven't lived there for 35 years. I'm definitely over it though...
I think just entertainment. That lets them count more users as active AI users, which adds to the already high number of daily active AI users (people who use Google search whether or not they end up reading the AI answer they get). I could see people using this to generate fake imagery for video that still has the satellite-like view, and using an actual photo of the target before adding the fictional stuff means less risk of hallucinated things around it. I'm not sure productive use was something they planned for.
This is how it's going, less than 48 hours later: "Thanks for your submissions, we appreciate it – unfortunately we have seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we've rolled back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails."
would it have hurt to put a screenshot or a more complete description for those of us who do not visit X?
