Washington, United States: Google rolled back Friday a new feature allowing Google Earth users to generate AI visualizations on top of the service's satellite imagery, following a furious backlash from researchers and open-source intelligence experts about the potential for disinformation.
"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," a Google spokesperson said in a statement to AFP. "So we're rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails."
"We know that people uniquely trust Google Earth for a reliable view of the world," the statement added.
The "create image" tool, unveiled Thursday, had integrated Google's Nano Banana 2 image-generation technology into Google Earth, letting users zoom into locations and build pictures in seconds based on the program's satellite, aerial and 3D-mapping data.
Google had described it as a way to "visualize history, create real estate plans and more."
But disinformation researchers warned that it could enable bad actors to misuse Google Earth -- a key resource for fact-checking and verification -- to create realistic geospatial fakes.
"Google spent 20 years building the reference the world checks against," digital investigations expert Henk Van Ess wrote in one widely shared post on Substack. "Today it added a button that makes things up."
Brady Africk, a research analyst at the American Enterprise Institute specializing in satellite imagery analysis, told AFP the Google Earth update would have made it "easier to generate convincing fake satellite imagery that can spread quickly online and mislead the public."
Such fakes "erode public trust in satellite imagery, and make the jobs of journalists and researchers more difficult," he said.
