Nano Banana 2 removed from Google Earth

ttaubek 1 day ago 34 commentsRead Article on digitaldigging.org

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Discussion (34 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

SwellJoe•1 day ago

There are a lot of things reasonable people would use AI for. This is not one of them. This is a crazy idea. Just plain bonkers. No sense to be found. "Oh, you want to see what's at that location? How about we make something up for you?"

paxys•1 day ago

Yeah this has “PM trying to put an AI release on their promo packet” written all over it.

ashleyn•about 6 hours ago

They could've done a lot more interesting things with AI in Google Earth though. Think planning a travel itinerary, or plaintext search of a POI.

I was just using Earth to plan an irrigation setup in my backyard, would've been damn nice to have MCP there to generate paths and circular regions illustrating coverage.

serf•about 10 hours ago

I didn't use the feature, so I don't know if it was capable of this, but the thing you describe sounds potentially useful for land developers or folks trying to conceptualize buildings/city-development.

the people who make those stupid renders of yet-to-be-built strip malls filled with people and live bands that they use to sell development plans to city commerce groups.

chrisandchris•about 15 hours ago

What I find interesting - and seems absolutely logic for such a large company - that it's fine for a group of people to work on something tha is clearly to fail from Day 1, and it just seems to be ok.

ncr100•1 day ago

Does this move us closer to needing registries of authentic images? (White-listing? Only a partial solution.)

Google's response today, in addition to removing nano banana from Earth, was that people should just use Google's synthID(?) AI detection app, to determine if this is a blacklisted (effectively) image.

Of course that's impractical because a million people could quickly receive the image .. the image would make an impression on them before detection. And, this would also mean that Google's AI detection software needs to be ran by every human for every image that they view, in order to determine if it's valid. So, let's say that's 100 images, so that's a 100 to the millionth power? (Did I really get a CS degree?) I think it's just 100 million visits to Google synthID tool.. lol.

If we go with a white listing approach then we know that we should trust the image. If we go with a blacklisting approach then we only know that we should not trust the image, which we already knew before we ran the tool....

- https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-plant-a-nuclear-plan... original article is more interesting, also linked in above main article

bko•about 13 hours ago

> Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. What on earth is Google doing? Check my latest post here:

We're back to nerfing Google's products because "safety". Yes, you can obviously do this stuff, like you can obviously use Excel to open up a financial statement, change some numbers and tweet about it.

The obvious answer, and I believe it's already being utilized, is watermarks. There's been a lot of research in creating imperceptible, unremovable fingerprints from the generated image. Think very subtle statistical patterns in the generated pixels.

Instead we're going to get some long prompt about how not to do bad things that steps all over the user's intent.

https://x.com/henkvaness/status/2082912544394498228?s=20

mysterydip•about 11 hours ago

Unless the watermark is a giant “This is fake” diagonally across the center of the image, everything will get shared virally in the 3 second attention span of doomscrolling without a second look.

zb3•about 10 hours ago

We already have open source image editing models, so how is this Google fault? This is UGC..

If I type something nefarious in Google search bar and then share that screenshot, is Google to blame for not even refusing rendering that text inside the input field?

varun_ch•about 9 hours ago

What is an AI image generator inside Google Earth useful for if not generating believable but fake images that look like they’re from Google Earth?

boston_clone•about 9 hours ago

instead of making potentially weak comparisons, could we consider why this feature was implemented in the first place? image editing models exist for good reason - I struggle to see a clear “why” for this product other than to cram generative content in yet another existing product.

mimischi•1 day ago

Is this the fastest Google has killed one of its own products (features)?

Ancalagon•1 day ago

Why does Google Earth need anything remotely related to AI image gen?

chedabob•1 day ago

A Product Manager in some AI-adjacent department needs a promotion.

netsharc•1 day ago

"Google career progression: shipped a feature this quarter [x]"...

Ah, box-ticking your way to oblivion...

walrus01•1 day ago

It doesn't. Whoever is above the Nano Banana 2 team at Google is pushing some agenda that forcibly integrates their AI slop image generator into other teams' products.

nc55g3g•about 14 hours ago

"Trusted view of the world" but you could make bomb craters in Gaza. SynthID watermark doesn't fix that.

rossant•about 21 hours ago

I can't wait for nano banana on pathology images.

g42gregory•about 23 hours ago

When they talk about everybody losing their jobs, that doesn’t bother them one bit. In fact, they seem to be truly happy when they talk about that. But this, Oh No!

ChrisArchitect•about 22 hours ago

Related earlier:

Google Earth's New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Satellite Images

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49124898

snvzz•about 19 hours ago

Censorship is now being called `guardrails`.

iamleppert•about 9 hours ago

Maybe LLMs will be the final nail in the coffin for putting every little ounce of every little article behind an annoying paywall.

A world model that ingests data in real-time from every flock camera, every iPhone, and every Rayban meta spy glasses won't have any need for journalists.

Jamesbeam•about 14 hours ago

A man cannot have fun any more these days.

Is allowing a man to generate corn circles to send conspiracy theorists on a wild goose chase through the UK for the weekend really too much to ask for?