WASHINGTON(National Times)- Google announced a new feature allowing Google Earth users to generate AI visualisations on top of the service’s satellite imagery, sparking concerns from researchers and open-source intelligence experts about the potential for disinformation.
The “create image” tool, rolled out on Thursday, integrates Google’s Nano Banana 2 image-generation technology to let users zoom into locations and build images in seconds based on Google Earth satellite, aerial and 3D-mapping data.
The company unveiled the feature as a way to “visualise history, create real estate plans and more”. But disinformation researchers are warning 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 on Substack. “Today it added a button that makes things up.
“The forgery does not have to look convincing on its own,” Van Ess added.
“It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on.” Brady Africk, a research analyst at the American Enterprise Institute specialising in satellite imagery analysis, said the Google Earth update “makes it easier to generate convincing fake satellite imagery that can spread quickly online and mislead the public”.
“These AI-generated fakes, growing more common, may also erode public trust in satellite imagery, and make the jobs of journalists and researchers more difficult.”
In a response on X, Google said images created with the feature include SynthID digital watermarks, invisible markers embedded in media generated using the company’s artificial intelligence tools. Users can ask Google’s Gemini chatbot if a SynthID is present.
