Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

BBlueBerry2001 about 3 hours ago 82 commentsRead Article on twitter.com

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Discussion (82 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

VCFundedGenYer•about 2 hours ago

There seem to be very few adults in the room at Google as of the past few years. This also happened with Bard's (remember when they thought Bard was a good name?) racist image generator. Does nobody do QA, UAT, or UX testing anymore?

fullstop•about 2 hours ago

I got Bard to execute a fork bomb, I think, when it was first launched. I noticed that it was evaluating the flow of a shell script incorrectly and it allowed execution, then refused to respond for 20 or 30 minutes.

Now, for some users, sharing a YouTube link adds some sort of tracking which then asks people who open the link to be "friends" with the person who shared it. Who thinks that this is a good idea, and why isn't it opt-in?

It's hard to take Google seriously these days.

threatripper•about 2 hours ago

Do you get promoted for not launching a product? The interests of the individual and the institution do not always perfectly align.

cyanregiment•about 2 hours ago

People who want to destroy you at work (which I imagine is rampant at Google) will sometimes prevent you from doing something, but they might also encourage you to do it in such a way that you fail spectacularly.

Some of my favorites from my career:

1. PM enticing me to "volunteer" to build a PoC over the weekend, to have it ready by Monday morning – come Monday, PoC is shipped live to all international customers. It was nowhere near prod ready, it was just to demo 1 thing.

Naturally, endless tickets open asking about missing functionality, and changes to the dashboard, "Nothing works!".

I'm in Slack talking to customer support like "Sorry I don't know why they launched it, it's not even close to being done". I've had nightmares about this kinda thing before, and then it happened lol. Anyway it was easy to paint the image that I'm just trash, biting off more than I can chew, can't let me near anything, and I got fired for it. They want back to maintenance mode.

It was a simple dashboard that looked great (for investors) and solved problems for customers, but there was no way the other guys on the team were going to let me launch that thing. Rather than stop it, they just "helped" get it out early. Project dead, they never built that.

2. And on the other end where I was stopped from launching something, I've had 2 devs go in league to say that code I was writing was a huge security risk (front-end React) and kept saying in meetings "Yeah I saw some things" without pointing out exactly what.

At some point one of them just irreversibly deletes all the branches related to it, live in standup, and puffs his chest "Yeah sorry guys we're not releasing this stuff, I'm worried about code quality" basically got him promoted to CTO.

So yeah I imagine politics and mind games happen all the time at Google, and it's probably very confusing what is or is not a good idea, what will work and will not work, because of the massive distraction of everyone backstabbing and preparing to backstab.

steveBK123•about 2 hours ago

> but they might also encourage you to do it in such a way that you fail spectacularly.

A skill one must develop is identifying no-win-scenario tasks that can be avoided. POCs are often such tasks.

A teammate and I got roped into some POC where everyone in the room seemed to silently agree the product was not fit for purpose. The meetings went in circles of seemingly trying to find anything they could do to use the product, rather than assessing it objectively on the use case the vendor pitched.

Behind the scenes it turned out the product was being pushed by someone seniors brother. So the thing was getting bought no matter what. What they were really looking for was the patsy to own finding any sort of use case for the stupid thing, integrating it and owning it.

Obviously a "the product cannot fail, it can only be failed" scenario. Run run run away.

threatripper•about 1 hour ago

Yeah, it's way easier to argue that the product is a bad idea if they give you all the resources to build, release and grow it but there's just not enough customers showing up.

The alternative might be internal battles to kill it that take up time and energy and everybody can continue their argument forever.

phoghed•about 2 hours ago

The reverse of this is also bad. Numerous arduous processes that exist mostly because the people who ship nothing far outnumber those who do. I imagine striking a perfect balance is difficult.

breppp•about 2 hours ago

The issue here is probably because you need to show how your work relates to AI to get promoted

obscurette•about 2 hours ago

It's a pattern much wider than Google or event technology sector. It's very apparent in AI craze trough society, public governance sector, journalism etc. For people like me (growing up in seventies) it seems that there is teenagers everywhere and nobody is responsible for anything any more.

projectileboy•about 2 hours ago

Google has always been a technology company, never a product company. It’s very deep in their DNA.

baxtr•about 2 hours ago

Google’s culture seems so different from Apple’s which sometimes comes across as overly mature… which I personally prefer though!

steveBK123•about 1 hour ago

Steve Job's mantra was that what you say No to is even more important than what you say Yes to.

Arguably dragging their heels on Apple Intelligence was an inadvertent form of this. Or years of working on a car but never releasing it. Or the other various rumored long-running prototypes/projects that never see the light of day.

There is someone with taste with authority to say no before slop is pushed onto the market, at least more often than their competitors. It's gotten worse over the years, but that reflex is still there on a relative basis.

jstummbillig•about 2 hours ago

Making bad mistakes is childish? Or correcting them?

BugsJustFindMe•about 2 hours ago

Exercising zero political awareness or foresight or understanding of people. The problem isn't that this was a mistake. The problem is that this mistake was obvious from a mile away to anyone who pays any attention to the world.

Also, the given justification for the feature was absolutely silly.

profsummergig•about 2 hours ago

What red flags would the name "Bard" have raised for you if you were on that team?

pjio•about 2 hours ago

Maybe I missed the reference like with Claude for Claude Shannon, but Bard always sounded like "Bart (Simpson)" to me.

JV00•about 2 hours ago

They are good products, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing them

the_snooze•about 1 hour ago

Proper engineering requires observing and working with real-world constraints. Ignoring constraints is a form of magical thinking.

One real-world constraint is that end-users won't always do what you intend for them to with the thing you engineered.

AaronAPU•about 1 hour ago

“Communism is a good political theory, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”

“Letting everyone out of prison is a good social strategy, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”

“Making all shops operate on the honor system is a good business strategy, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”

binary132•about 2 hours ago

what’s wrong with the name Bard?

card_zero•39 minutes ago

It's not very goord.

apercu•about 2 hours ago

I imagine because Bards never let the truth get in the way of a good story?

mikeweiss•about 2 hours ago

I preferred it to Gemini

toilet•about 2 hours ago

I would have preferred "Bort"

hbcdbff•about 2 hours ago

Google is no longer a technology company, it’s a vehicle for engineers to acquire wealth via promotions

hollow-moe•about 2 hours ago

Didn't the saying go something like "go fast, break law" ?

angrydev•about 2 hours ago

Here is the original blog post, in case anyone is curious about the 'good path' https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/earth/na...

> Ex: Help students visualize the past instead of just reading about it. Teachers can show their classroom a historic site and type, “Render a hyper-realistic view of what these Pompeii ruins looked like in 78 A.D.” The modern-day ruins will instantly transform into a bustling, colorful street scene from the Roman Empire.

ofjcihen•about 2 hours ago

There are a metric boatload of these visualizations created to accompany history texts etc.

AI for image generation is great but I’m struggling to figure out why you would ever use this if it’s confined to satellite imagery.

coldpie•about 2 hours ago

This is all so fucking stupid.

Gigachad•about 2 hours ago

Managers all have AI psychosis right now and the only way to get by is going along with their nonsense.

coldpie•about 2 hours ago

The bubble needs to burst already. Everyone so braindead that they actually build and ship a product like this fucking garbage needs to be out on the street.

Like, read that fucking prompt again. If that doesn't make you want to stick forks in your eyes, you're deep, deep in the psychosis.

inigyou•about 2 hours ago

https://xcancel.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/208324996215076061...

rdtsc•about 2 hours ago

What did that even do. Generate imaginary buildings and structures?

I am almost sure this was something for a performance or promotion: “Used AI effectively to…”

haunter•about 2 hours ago

Oh nothing serious

just traffic accident https://cdn.xcancel.com/video/9829FB6B34807/https%3A%2F%2Fvi...

refugees on the streets https://cdn.xcancel.com/video/7631603BD54FB/https%3A%2F%2Fvi...

a bomb crater near a hospital in Gaza https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOgBJEcWQAA--zV?format=jpg&name=...

a nuclear power plant in Iran https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOgBP-OXAAATHWQ?format=jpg&name=...

a plane hitting the One World Trade Center https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOoW-0HWIAAdl0y?format=jpg&name=...

the Eiffel tower collapsed https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOoW-z0XkAAN0KI?format=jpg&name=...

an army base in the Amazons https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOgmohwWEAEn3gq?format=jpg&name=...

Levitz•21 minutes ago

With the ruckus, I thought this would be something that was displayed in Google Earth.

I can't grasp how this is an issue at all? There are other 20 services you can use to do this exact same thing.

j_maffe•about 2 hours ago

Such a brain-dead idea...

drcongo•about 2 hours ago

I love how terrible these are, the nuclear power plant especially. They've all got an extremely amateur MS Paint vibe to them.

haunter•about 2 hours ago

It reminded me to the artstyle of SimCity 4

Amezarak•about 2 hours ago

Did Google Earth actually show these as replacements for the true imagery? Or are people simply complaining that people were able to generate these images at all? I'm struggling to understand the controversy.

smallerize•about 2 hours ago

Instead of having to go out of your way, there's an inviting "create a fiction" button. https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-plant-a-nuclear-plan... In February this year, someone manually forged a photo like this. "The Tehran Times posted it as a before-and-after of a US radar site in Qatar... AFP and BBC Verify both ran the “after” through Google’s watermark detector and got a hit, though not before it passed 950,000 views. Building it had taken six steps — screenshot Earth, open Gemini, upload, prompt, download, crop... Tonight Manama can be changed in seconds."

xnx•about 1 hour ago

The controversy is people are desperate to be upset at "big tech" and Google in particular. This feature didn't do anything that couldn't be accomplished with an extra 30 seconds in other AI image editors.

smallerize•about 2 hours ago

Some examples in the Ars Technica article include "refugees near the Mexican border", "a giant golden statue of President Donald Trump looming over the White House", and "a hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza". https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/google-earth-releases-swi...

reenorap•about 2 hours ago

I think if Google stopped retreating so quickly with its tail between its legs after getting “embarrassed”, people would stop caring. All of the “sins” that were created via this is nothing that other AI couldn’t produce either.

Part of the sport in making Google look bad is because they know Google will predictably cower when they are embarrassed. If they just said “ya, sometimes people will make bad pics but who cares?” people would stop caring.

Everything that Ars Technica found in my opinion is nothing that other AI image generators couldn’t do on their own. What’s the big deal?

AlexAplin•about 2 hours ago

Any boast about AI accelerating the development lifecycle comes with an equal or greater stock that examples like this become more frequent when there are less opportunities for someone to interrupt them with a smidge of common sense.

intexpress•about 2 hours ago

I liked the feature (once I figured out how to access it, so confusing). But it only let you generate 1 image per day. So kind of useless.

650•about 2 hours ago

Product managers at Google have a strangehold on their bad releases. It's become a whole thing for engineers to have to please their XFN (cross functional) partners in product and UX for review cycles and promos.

witx•about 2 hours ago

Good, it was a piece of bad software not to call other things. Who though it was a good idea?

1vuio0pswjnm7•37 minutes ago

30 Jul 2026 15:15:01 UTC

Google Rolls Out Nano Banana AI in Earth

https://digg.com/tech/rtkdxzb1

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49111228

[ok]

31 Jul 2026 16:06:51 UTC

Google Earth's New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Satellite Images

https://www.404media.co/google-earths-new-ai-lets-anyone-fab...

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

[ok]

31 Jul 2026 18:32:08 UTC

The problem with putting an AI image generator in Google Earth

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/973764/g...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49126938

[ok]

31 Jul 2026 20:04:03 UTC

Google withdraws new Earth AI tool after warnings over misinformation risks

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9349yx2ydvo

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127949

[ok]

31 Jul 2026 20:43:11 UTC

Google Earth risked ruin with retracted AI tool for making fake satellite pics

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/google-earth-releases-swi...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49128310

[ok]

vvbull•about 2 hours ago

This is predictable... they built a misinformation engine capable of generating things like falsified drone strikes, terrorist attacks, industrial accidents, and threatening images. Seems like no one paused and thought "what would the malicious internet do with this?"

zb3•about 2 hours ago

But we can already generate these images via image editing models, so what's new here?

trial3•about 3 hours ago

i’m struggling to think of a reason to use this other than shitposting

mistrial9•about 2 hours ago

invalidate all remote sensing imagery from this day forward?

pluc•about 3 hours ago

any new data is good data

- all the AI corps

whycome•about 2 hours ago

What even was this

boredpudding•about 2 hours ago

You could take an area of Google Earth and let it be 'improved' by AI. So you could add a playground instead of a parking lot, or add migrants near a border post.

Due to consequences unforeseen by Google, it was used more for the latter.

enraged_camel•about 3 hours ago

I honestly don't know what the hell Google was thinking. I know shoving AI into everything is the rage these days, but this is simply an even more insane way to demolish the credibility of your own product than the AI overviews in Google Search.

Glad they came to their senses quickly.

hidelooktropic•about 2 hours ago

I like the AI overviews.

inigyou•about 2 hours ago

That's how they get you. They are trained to make you like them. They are not trained to convey true information.

steveBK123•about 2 hours ago

Yes, they are at best misleading and often just present dangerously incomplete or misdirecting information. The more you know about a topic the more appalling the summary.

I check variations of this search every month and it still fails at a reasonably high rate https://imgur.com/a/tKSQuA3

pennomi•about 2 hours ago

I find them irritating because they will link a source entirely unrelated to (or worse, directly contradicting) the fact they are claiming. The Google AI summaries might be the most blatantly hallucinating model widely deployed right now.

I’ve had them abruptly try to turn mathematical theorems into cooking recipes before cutting off mid-sentence in a panic.

jjulius•about 2 hours ago

YMMV, but nearly every one I read has a glaringly incorrect comment. I frequently research off-trail mountaineering routes and the incorrect bullshit it confidently spouts at the top of a list of results (results which very much counter the AI overview) is liable to end up getting someone hurt, lost, or worse.

steveBK123•about 2 hours ago

I also see this failure mode where it inverts the question and answer the affirmative to the inverted question (therefore the opposite of correct answer).

If you read too quickly or are on a mobile device, the clarifying information may be below the line break.

https://imgur.com/a/tKSQuA3

on a mobile device (iPhone Pro Max) with Large Text enabled you can see how the clarifying text starts to roll over to the next line:

https://imgur.com/a/wvNspMT

Imagine a senior on an older smaller phone with large text enabled, easily missing the Opposite Day answer.

Zigurd•about 2 hours ago

I suppose I could think of worse use cases like: give me a recipe for a sketchy peptide shake, but not by much.

nkrisc•about 2 hours ago

Not every technology needs to exist simply because it’s possible.

zb3•about 2 hours ago

They'll shove AI everywhere, whether it makes sense or not doesn't matter. Sundar said "AI" needs to be everywhere, so they hope integrating AI into X will get them promoted. And unfortunately, this might even work..

cryo32•about 2 hours ago

I’d suggest anyone knee deep in AI reads the comments on this one. Then remember that they’re your market and customers.

It has got to the point it’s poison outside the niche tech bubble.

bradfitz•about 2 hours ago

Well now I want to see the images that got this taken down.