Google kills Earth AI generator after one day | Hacker News Reader

Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

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64 pointsBlueBerry2001105 comments

There 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?

I got Bard to execute a fork bomb, I think, when it was first launched. I noticed that it was evaluating the flow of a shell script incorrectly and it allowed execution, then refused to respond for 20 or 30 minutes.

Now, for some users, sharing a YouTube link adds some sort of tracking which then asks people who open the link to be "friends" with the person who shared it. Who thinks that this is a good idea, and why isn't it opt-in?

It's hard to take Google seriously these days.

Always delete the si= or is= parameter from a shared YouTube link. This will work until they copy Reddit's idea of encoding both the video ID and sharing indicator together as one big opaque encrypted string.

Does Reddit do that too? Is it just on the "new" UI?

I know TikTok encodes it in an inconspicuous way, the ID in the shared URL just looks like a normal ID but it's different from the bare video ID. Then both of you (I think) get a "Do you know person xyz?" type of notification.

Reddit encodes the whole thing in an opaque blob, giving you a URL like reddit.com/share/<blob> that cannot be transformed into any other format without fetching it.

On a browser, you can strip the share id and post title to create a “clean” old.reddit link, with this pattern: https://old.reddit.com/r/bapcsalescanada/comments/1vd9h0j/

Do you get promoted for not launching a product? The interests of the individual and the institution do not always perfectly align.

The 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.

The issue here is probably because you need to show how your work relates to AI to get promoted

People 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.

> but they might also encourage you to do it in such a way that you fail spectacularly.

A skill one must develop is identifying no-win-scenario tasks that can be avoided. POCs are often such tasks.

A teammate and I got roped into some POC where everyone in the room seemed to silently agree the product was not fit for purpose. The meetings went in circles of seemingly trying to find anything they could do to use the product, rather than assessing it objectively on the use case the vendor pitched.

Behind the scenes it turned out the product was being pushed by someone seniors brother. So the thing was getting bought no matter what. What they were really looking for was the patsy to own finding any sort of use case for the stupid thing, integrating it and owning it.

Obviously a "the product cannot fail, it can only be failed" scenario. Run run run away.

These guys with their brothers and uncles!!!

If anyone in tech wants to adopt a grown man hmu I need a network

The longer I work and the higher I go, the less I believe that we have a meritocracy. Directionally, yes.. but the higher you go the more nepotistic the world really is. And that's putting aside starting conditions which are already not meritocratic.

Even if it's not the compliance/legal definition of "nepotism".. its all "networks" and "relationships".

Yeah, it's way easier to argue that the product is a bad idea if they give you all the resources to build, release and grow it but there's just not enough customers showing up.

The alternative might be internal battles to kill it that take up time and energy and everybody can continue their argument forever.

It's a pattern much wider than Google or event technology sector. It's very apparent in AI craze trough society, public governance sector, journalism etc. For people like me (growing up in seventies) it seems that there is teenagers everywhere and nobody is responsible for anything any more.

Google has always been a technology company, never a product company. It’s very deep in their DNA.

Google’s culture seems so different from Apple’s which sometimes comes across as overly mature… which I personally prefer though!

Steve Job's mantra was that what you say No to is even more important than what you say Yes to.

Arguably dragging their heels on Apple Intelligence was an inadvertent form of this. Or years of working on a car but never releasing it. Or the other various rumored long-running prototypes/projects that never see the light of day.

There is someone with taste with authority to say no before slop is pushed onto the market, at least more often than their competitors. It's gotten worse over the years, but that reflex is still there on a relative basis.

what’s wrong with the name Bard?

I imagine because Bards never let the truth get in the way of a good story?

It's frustrating when a product has a generic name that returns pages of unrelated search results. It's also frustrating when the name gives no real hint about what it does.

Ah yes, unlike Gemini which explains exactly what it does and has no other matches.

It's not very goord.

I preferred it to Gemini

I would have preferred "Bort"

What kind of a name is Bort?

My son is also named Bort

Making bad mistakes is childish? Or correcting them?

Exercising zero political awareness or foresight or understanding of people. The problem isn't that this was a mistake. The problem is that this mistake was obvious from a mile away to anyone who pays any attention to the world.

Also, the given justification for the feature was absolutely silly.

What red flags would the name "Bard" have raised for you if you were on that team?

Maybe I missed the reference like with Claude for Claude Shannon, but Bard always sounded like "Bart (Simpson)" to me.

I thought Bard was an acceptable name. But I think Gemini is better. The "G" associates better with Google.

They are good products, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing them

Proper engineering requires observing and working with real-world constraints. Ignoring constraints is a form of magical thinking.

One real-world constraint is that end-users won't always do what you intend for them to with the thing you engineered.

I would take that risk in exchange for access to more capabilities but I am understanding most people risk acceptance is lower than mine. Some want to live in a world of rubber.

“Communism is a good political theory, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”

“Letting everyone out of prison is a good social strategy, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”

“Making all shops operate on the honor system is a good business strategy, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”

These are really bad examples! Actually you listed 3 things with no underlying value. A more proper example would be a knife, it is a very useful tool and can also be abused. Honestly I would rather live with the risk than in a world without knives. But to each his own.

Google is no longer a technology company, it’s a vehicle for engineers to acquire wealth via promotions

Didn't the saying go something like "go fast, break law" ?

Here is the original blog post, in case anyone is curious about the 'good path' 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.

There are a metric boatload of these visualizations created to accompany history texts etc.

AI for image generation is great but I’m struggling to figure out why you would ever use this if it’s confined to satellite imagery.

Google is gasping hard for any meaningul AI use

This is all so fucking stupid.

Managers all have AI psychosis right now and the only way to get by is going along with their nonsense.

The 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.

Yes, 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".

That'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!

What a persistently low interest rate does to an economy. (It completely destroys it via this process.)

The low interest rate doesn't help, but I'm wondering if it could be possible that, against the ideological need to pretend otherwise, we've also hit the saturation point in a lot of industries in terms of what can be done without brand new major breakthroughs. To normal people we'd just plateau for a while, but for businesses it is unacceptable, hence the thrashing.

https://xcancel.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/208324996215076061...

What 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…”

Oh nothing serious

just traffic accident https://cdn.xcancel.com/video/9829FB6B34807/https%3A%2F%2Fvi...

refugees on the streets 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=...

a nuclear power plant in Iran 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=...

the Eiffel tower collapsed 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=...

With the ruckus, I thought this would be something that was displayed in Google Earth.

I can't grasp how this is an issue at all? There are other 20 services you can use to do this exact same thing.

I love how terrible these are, the nuclear power plant especially. They've all got an extremely amateur MS Paint vibe to them.

It reminded me to the artstyle of SimCity 4

Such a brain-dead idea...

Did Google Earth actually show these as replacements for the true imagery? Or are people simply complaining that people were able to generate these images at all? I'm struggling to understand the controversy.

Instead of having to go out of your way, there's an inviting "create a fiction" button. https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-plant-a-nuclear-plan... In February this year, someone manually forged a photo like this. "The Tehran Times posted it as a before-and-after of a US radar site in Qatar... AFP and BBC Verify both ran the “after” through Google’s watermark detector and got a hit, though not before it passed 950,000 views. Building it had taken six steps — screenshot Earth, open Gemini, upload, prompt, download, crop... Tonight Manama can be changed in seconds."

Right, I understand that you were able to generate these images from Google Earth. But nowhere can I find, including in that article, where other people could see your generations presented in Google Maps/Earth as if they were real imagery. The whole complaint is that people were able to generate these images at all. Or am I misunderstanding something? It seems like the complaint is that hypothetically you could generate these images and then share them elsewhere and try to trick people. Is that accurate or am I misunderstanding?

That's correct. The end of the article also covers defeating the AI watermark.

Then frankly I find this all overblown and somewhat insane. The AI safetyism moral panic is something I find very demoralizing. It seems like the main legacy of AI will be its use as leverage to annihilate computing freedom and privacy for all time.

I am sympathetic to arguments that quantity has a quality all of its own - for example, I think this has deeply impacted privacy. It may have been legal to discreetly follow someone and note their movements for most of history, but because it wasn't scalable, there was no major privacy threat for doing so. Now it can be done at scale and very cheaply. "Quantity" has qualitatively transformed privacy in practical, real terms.

But nearly all the AI panic seems to be oriented around very different core principle - rather than "technological changes are making us less free in practice" it is "technological changes threaten public harmony." This is the core concern in all authoritarian empires. The idea is that people simply shouldn't be allowed to generate images or texts The Experts have decided they shouldn't be allowed to, because (in this case) it might make journalists' jobs harder, or it might trick too many people, or its offensive, or it offends some really vague notion of "safety" (or can be construed as such by people writing breathless articles for engagement dollars that will be bad PR for the AI company involved.) Yes, doubtless many people will be deceived by AI imagery. Many people already are. This number will certainly be higher than the number of people deceived by altered photographs, which are less in number and require more work to create. But this does not represent a earth-shattering disaster that must be dealt with by banning (somewhat dumb and silly) product ideas like "generate an AI photo based on this satellite imagery" buttons on Google Maps. It can be dealt with by cultural understandings of any imagery shifting, and a general return to older (not unprecedented) information environments. I think in the West, the rise of broadcast and state media really broke people's mental models of information - it really inculcated the idea that people cannot be trusted even in a democratic society to evaluate things on their own: someone must be doing it for them, top-down. The way things worked in the pre-broadcast environment is maybe inconceivable to them now. (And to some extent, there was always a "parallel" information environment that was in the background, but not highly visible to the people in charge, full of conspiratorial nonsense - but they could ignore that because they didn't see it.)

The ultimate endpoint of AI Safetyism is local models are illegal or highly regulated, computing devices are locked down, and only a small list of government-approved AI vendors with tight restrictions are allowed to Do AI. This is totally unnecessary, but it certainly has massive financial benefits for those who thing they can get on the list.

I don't know what you're complaining about but I don't think it's this. There is no "ban" on generating AI images. The backlash is not about new tech because there is no new tech here, it's just Nano Banana 2. And I haven't seen any privacy implications.

The button makes it socially acceptable to generate misinformation. That's it. You can do the misinformation if you want, but we should discourage it. The button should go.

The people writing about this are complaining that this is even possible, not just that Google was enabling it.

> The button makes it socially acceptable to generate misinformation. That's it.

No, it does not. It makes it socially acceptable to use AI for fun. Yes, moralizing scolds hate that idea and want to talk about how bad actors can and will use it for misinformation purposes as well. Even some of the examples in the thread starter are clearly just from people having fun. In general the whole "safety" and "policy" thing is stupid - consider the "Eiffel Tower" example. I guess that's "unsafe", even if I just generated it to laugh at, or to use in my forthcoming webnovel about kaiju. No, we can't allow Google Maps to let me generate that image because what if I was a Russian bot using it to generate misinformation to convince gullible people who believe random social media accounts that the Eiffel Tower collapsed? It is very obvious where this line of thought leads.

Can you show me an example of someone calling for government regulation or a ban?

That's reasonable, except "It can be dealt with by cultural understandings of any imagery shifting, and a general return to older (not unprecedented) information environments". What does that mean? Is the older information environment books and newspapers? Then only a tyrant could arrange a return to that state, which didn't prevent the readers being credulous anyway. So the problem can't be dealt with in this way, there's nobody to do the dealing, and we wouldn't want them to deal with it even if they could. You can only hope that people wise up to slop, but we've been hoping that people in general get wiser since the dawn of time.

To some extent, mind you, people really have got wiser, and the wising-up process requires freedom. This is a problem similar to the draconian censorship of enemy propaganda, which wins wars for the good guys at the cost of throwing their good guy status into question.

> What does that mean? Is the older information environment books and newspapers? Then only a tyrant could arrange a return to that state, which didn't prevent the readers being credulous anyway.

No, not a return to books and newspapers, but a return to where there was a huge array of distributed and untrustworthy information sources, with the central authorities often having only a weak influence on them. The world was rife with gossip, rumors, and misinformation that spread mainly through word-of-mouth and papers and pamphlets of various kinds many of which had very little regard for the truth. As was complained of very often and sometimes led to quite amazing consequences.

Of course, in this environment, most people recognized that everything should be taken with a grain of salt, because they knew quite well that people could just make things up and there was no easy way to disprove it. That would be the environment we'd be returning to, to some degree - we'd actually still be better off, in that an educated and informed person would usually still be quite capable of determining if it was true or not in many instances, thanks to the good part of the Internet.

> we'd actually still be better off, in that an educated and informed person would usually still be quite capable of determining if it was true or not in many instances

Oh, so "we" doesn't actually refer to humans in general.

Gullible people can now automatically be detected and exploited, gnawed down to the bone and thrown away with none of the people who harvest their resources ever meeting or even thinking of them, but you are too smart for that, so it's fine. You don't need there to be a public space that is rational and allows humans to grow in, you had parents, you had an education, and there isn't anyone dear to you that you'd have to worry about either.

But at the same time demanding the public to support more of what benefits you. Why? What's in it for the majority of people to accept something they don't like just because you like it? Why should they accept chaos because you think you'd rise above it? What kind of unilateral partaking in society is that? Frankly, this seems so callous and myopic I think you would last nowhere near as long in a true post-factual-reality pandemonium as you think you would, either.

> Gullible people can now automatically be detected and exploited, gnawed down to the bone and thrown away with none of the people who harvest their resources ever meeting or even thinking of them, but you are too smart for that, so it's fine. You don't need there to be a public space that is rational and allows humans to grow in, you had parents, you had an education, and there isn't anyone dear to you that you'd have to worry about either.

You misunderstand. I don't posit that the educated classes are actually much or often any better off. All you have to do to convince them of something that is true is imply it's low class and boorish to think otherwise, and provide a sophisticated intellectual justification. Less educated people are often harder to fool because many of them have a reflexive distrust of sophisticated intellectual justifications and authority. What I said was that an educated and informed person would be capable of disproving false claims, much more so than they were 100+ years ago.

The difference here is that you believe the educated and intelligent (no doubt as determined by your preferences) should make decisions on others' behalf about what resources should be available to them. That is not what democratic societies are about; of course we've long been on the path for an authoritarian managerial state broadly throughout the West, and for better or worse that's ultimately what you're arguing for.

> But at the same time demanding the public to support more of what benefits you. Why?

Freely available, unrestricted AI net benefits everyone, though there will undoubtedly be social disruption and adjustments, as there is with all new technology. Restricted AI, tightly regulated and controlled, with the best stuff gatekept, benefits a very small class of people.

This is even more obvious when you consider the obvious outcomes here: it's trivial for someone with local models to download satellite imagery and modify it however they want, then use it to create and post misinformation. So you're not stopping everyone. You don't have any hope or possibility of doing so. You just want to gatekeep it away from regular people, who might have all kinds of legitimate uses for it, including things neither of us have ever thought of.

> Frankly, this seems so callous and myopic I think you would last nowhere near as long in a true post-factual-reality pandemonium as you think you would, either.

The world got along quite fine in this pandemonium prior to the 20th century.

The controversy is people are desperate to be upset at "big tech" and Google in particular. This feature didn't do anything that couldn't be accomplished with an extra 30 seconds in other AI image editors.

Some 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-swi...

Any 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.

Product 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.

I 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?

I 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.

I like the AI overviews.

That's how they get you. They are trained to make you like them. They are not trained to convey true information.

Yes, 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

That'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.

Replacing “okay” with “safe” also fails

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

It's also very non-deterministic. Not a 100% failure rate, seems to go up&down with time, and varies depending on plant/animal combination

Can you elaborate? Are they not toxic? Are they toxic, but the chemical analysis wrong?

If 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?

Ah 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"

Right 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

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

I 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.

YMMV, 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.

I 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

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

Imagine a senior on an older smaller phone with large text enabled, easily missing the Opposite Day answer.

I suppose I could think of worse use cases like: give me a recipe for a sketchy peptide shake, but not by much.

Not every technology needs to exist simply because it’s possible.

I 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.

Good, it was a piece of bad software not to call other things. Who though it was a good idea?

They'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..

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127573

This 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?"

But we can already generate these images via image editing models, so what's new here?

One 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.

i’m struggling to think of a reason to use this other than shitposting

invalidate all remote sensing imagery from this day forward?

They have tokens to spend and managers are mentally ill and want AI in everything

any new data is good data

- all the AI corps

What even was this

You 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.

30 Jul 2026 15:15:01 UTC

Google Rolls Out Nano Banana AI in Earth

https://digg.com/tech/rtkdxzb1

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-fab...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49124898

[ok]

31 Jul 2026 18:32:08 UTC