Google has pulled a newly launched artificial intelligence feature from Google Earth barely a day after releasing it, following a swift backlash from journalists and open-source investigators who warned it could flood the internet with convincing fake satellite imagery.
The company introduced the tool on July 30, letting users zoom to any location on Google Earth's web version, click "create image," and generate a scene from a text prompt using its Nano Banana model. By July 31, it was gone.
Re: our statement on Image Generation in Google Earth: “We know that people uniquely trust Google Earth for a reliable view of the world. We’ve seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we’ve also seen people sharing screenshots of…
Satellite imagery has long served as a trusted anchor for verifying breaking news and atrocities, precisely because it has been difficult to fake. Bellingcat researcher Jake Godin cautioned that one-click generation would streamline the creation of fakes and accelerate their spread, adding that misinformation outruns any correction and that governments could now dismiss authentic images as fabricated.
Google had initially downplayed the concerns, noting that every image carries its SynthID watermark, which flags it as AI-generated in tools like Gemini, and that it blocks creation on harmful topics. Critics called that insufficient, arguing few people stop to verify images before sharing them.
Google said it would reinstate image generation in Google Earth only after implementing tighter protections, though it gave no timeline.
