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It was cancelled though.
It's still an instructive case:
- It was foreseeable (and, probably, foreseen by many people at Google) that the tool would be used in harmful ways.
- Google released it anyway
This is textbook negligence. Unjustified refusal to avoid a foreseeable harm.
That pattern of negligence is the AI boom in a nutshell.
I wonder if they are just so careless that they don't consider any implications of what they were doing, or are they testing waters about how much reaction they receive?
90% chance this was “you need to add AI features or you’re going on a PIP”
Fair point. Alphabet may even have decided it was a cost-effective way to generate publicity for Google Earth, which has been out of the headlines for a decade or more.
Textbook case of "they didn't stop to think if they should".
Might have been generating more training data.
its public front end was canceled. israel can still use it’s existence as a way to claim proof of its genocide is fake while others can use it to generate propaganda.
I wonder why google would want a service that makes it harder to discern what satellite images of bombed out homes are real or fake, and why they would want this kind of program to be publically accessible.
I hate AI, and I love maps. If I had to use AI, this would be the most tolerable way. My emails to the local traffic engineering department would get a lot more spicy! Thankfully we have GIMP so I don't have to kill the earth to make satellite photos.
I said it before, this is the perfect tool to cause confusion and plausible deniability, released just as the US and Israel is mounting losses of military bases and equipment fror their illegal wars and invasions all over the Middle East.
Article doesn't load. Please don't share links to 404media
Paywalled
Dark pattern in 404, only few lines more if you create an account, better search other sources
https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/gemini/articles/google-earth-ai-lets-anyone-182749664.html
Feature removed by Google at 31 July
https://decrypt.co/374805/google-yanks-google-earth-ai-image-tool-deepfake-fears
Area 51?
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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Fuck AI
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