Google Earth AI Feature Briefly Enabled, Then Disabled Over Misuse Concerns

For roughly 24 hours beginning on a Thursday, Google Earth offered a new artificial-intelligence tool that let users type any prompt and receive a synthetic satellite view. —was intended to let people imagine future landscapes or visualize empty lots. Within hours, open-source-intelligence researchers, journalists and others demonstrated that the same capability could produce highly realistic images of nuclear power plants, refugee camps along borders, burned forests, flooded cities and even a fatal car crash.

New York Times

For two decades, Google Earth has been a widely used platform for journalists, governments and investigators to corroborate events and debunk misinformation. Its publicly accessible satellite imagery has served as a baseline for fact-checking and situational awareness across a range of crises.

New York Times

The ease with which the AI feature generated convincing yet fabricated aerial scenes raised immediate alarm. Users shared screenshots that appeared to violate Google’s content policies, prompting concerns that the tool could be weaponized for misinformation, propaganda or illicit planning. Within a day of the rollout, Google announced that it was disabling the feature.

New York Times

Google issued a brief statement acknowledging both legitimate and problematic uses of the AI capability.

New York Times

“We’ve seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we’ve also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies,” — Google

New York Times