Fortunately they removed it a day later.

Because of course. Who could have seen that coming before they added it

What on Earth was every the intended use of this feature? I just can’t think of any way to use it other than vandalism and misinformation.

Google wanted its satellite images to help unleash users’ imaginations, like visualizing what an empty lot could look like, or seeing what their neighborhood looked like 100 years ago, or what it could look like 100 years from now.

I remember doing something similar for a highschool History class – learning about local rivers, riparian corridors, the ancient California valley lake, and our soil types (why and are what they are). All things to draw up a more accurate picture. No way Google would utilize any of that knowledge. If I was a kid today, with that tool… definitely F- homework for sure.

All imagination, no accuracy.

All imagination random guess work, no accuracy.

I don’t necessarily buy their press release as their actual designed use case.

It’s intended use was misinformation but perhaps not in the way you imagine.

Rather than producing credible images, these sorts of projects undermine actual credible images.

For example, if you’re team zion, then when shown images of how devastating Israel’s attack on Gaza has been you can just disregard them as “probably fake”.

“Oh pish posh, a child can create these images on google maps”.

I would’ve asked it to turn my city into a Warhammer 40k battlefield.

So Detroit?

I’m guessing that either a few devs thought it could be a cool toy and never gave a second thought about the ramifications (I can remotely understand that) or a bunch of managers who just dont give a shit thought they could monetize it

Oh I’m certain it’s still there for their use.

I wonder what’s stopping someone from just making a screen grab of a Google Maps satellite view and feeding it to one of the many AI image generators.

Eh, this one’s fixable, because you only have a few sources of legit imagery, and it’s all contemporary and digital. Just have Google Earth render the image server-side and add a cryptographic signature to any legit satellite images that someone saves.

Nobody is gonna do all that.

Those are balls.

This close, they always look like landscape. But nope, you're looking at balls.

Are those balls? 'Cause the last time we were here, they were balls.

This is old news; backlash was immediate and the “feature” was rescinded.

It might have been that plan all along, but now you can’t tell someone to just google it. You can’t believe google results anymore.

Don’t even understand what this AI feature was even supposed to be for. I’m certainly not going to rely on an AI to annotate satellite imagery. This was always just a stupid marketing thing with no real purpose behind it.

For all of Google’s faults, which of course are numerous, they do have some really talented engineers working for them, and it’s just a shame that their time is constantly wasted on crap like this rather than on useful features that people would actually benefit from.

It will be used to hide more zorro ranches and islands. It will also show areas that look nice, but will be leveled like Gaza

It’s to further the assault on truth.

This is the answer.

wow…! people is using a feature that allows you to modify the appearance of a location anywhere on earth to add craters to places!! truly an unforseeable tragedy.

I mean, it does seem fun. I don’t want to turn it off. But maybe insert a hash into the image that makes it clear it’s fake

Nano banana!