Ed Parsons, who used to work at Google, has some words about the Google Earth AI image generation debacle. “Veterans of the Geo organization understood an unwritten rule that took decades to build:
Geospatial trust is hard to win and terrifyingly easy to lose. Google Earth is relied upon by human rights investigators, journalists, emergency responders, and courts of law as a baseline truth layer of our planet. Once you train the public to accept that the satellite view can be whimsically altered by typing a prompt about a ‘lakeside cabin’ or a ‘futuristic metropolis’, you destroy the integrity of the platform. If
anythingon the screen can be AI-generated, then
nothingon the screen can be trusted.”
Previously: Google Earth Goes Nano Bananas (which has been updated a few times since first publication).