How to Plant a Nuclear Plant in Iran ⇥ digitaldigging.org

Google Earth project manager Bryan Horowitz:

For the first time, you can generate custom images using Google Earth’s satellite, aerial, and 3D imagery alongside Nano Banana, which creates concepts grounded in the real world. Just zoom in to a place in Google Earth on web, tap “create image,” and type whatever you want to see.

Henk van Ess, Digital Digging:

Google built that reference and it is not a small thing. Street View passed 10 million miles of road in 2019. It now holds more than 280 billion images across over 110 countries. Google Earth turned twenty this year. Between them they are a photographic record of the physical world, and — this is the part that matters — every frame of it is dated.

Dated is the whole trick. If you know when the picture was taken, you can prove when something appeared.

Anyone could take a screenshot and modify it using A.I. tools somewhere else — sure. Van Ess documents an example of this very thing happening when, last year, an X user created an image of a supposed drone strike taking out a U.S. base in Bahrain. However, that is at least a little bit more difficult than it is when it is built into Google Earth.

These are reference tools, and the de facto standard in many industries. The images might not become embedded into the map. But Google is centring its ability to create fraudulent images. And why? Might as well have the Oxford University Press build a novel word generator into its online dictionary.