The Download

Google Earth

TL;DR: A new AI image generation feature now lives inside Google Earth. An independent researcher found that it’s trivially easy to abuse, letting you create realistic satellite images of violent or politically inflammatory scenes, despite the company saying it has guardrails.

What happened: With a simple prompt, you can now generate AI images that drop fake structures, people, or events over Google’s satellite imagery. The new feature went live yesterday in Google Earth using Nano Banana 2—and it’s a puzzling add-on to a go-to tool often used in education and by open-source intelligence analysts and journalists.

While making realistic-looking deepfakes of satellite images was possible before, this AI feature does it in one step (often in just a minute)—and results can be refined to look more convincing. You can probably see the potential danger from space, and journalists and researchers are already voicing their concerns.

What could go wrong?: Google’s own pitch for the tool is benign—recreating historical places or visualizing a real estate project using the actual topography before you break ground. Its blog post encourages you to “let your imagination run wild,” but that’s exactly the worry.

Researcher Henk van Ess found that a single sentence was enough to place a nuclear power plant in Iran, drop a crowd of refugees near the US-Mexico border, or even depict a fatal crash on an Amsterdam street. 404 Media reported it was able to add both a homeless encampment and a bomb blast crater in Los Angeles.

Google’s response: In a statement to van Ess, Google said it takes misinformation seriously and that “every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark.” But detecting that watermark, which is invisible to the human eye, takes an extra step—either asking Gemini or using Google Lens to see if the image is fake. (There’s also a Gemini watermark on every image, but it’s easy to crop out.) And when van Ess posted a screen recording of his fake imagery on X, a popular third-party AI detector gave it just a 0.8% likelihood of being AI.

Google also said it prevents “image creation on harmful topics,” but van Ess reports that none of the prompts he tried were refused. As of publication time, Tech Brew could still prompt the tool to place a nuclear plant in Iran without any objection.

Bottom line: Google says there are guardrails in place. But given everything, it’s unclear what it counts as a harmful topic. In an age of so much disinformation, having an AI image generator inside this reputable digital atlas sounds like a recipe for disaster. —WK

Also at Google…

• Finally! One of Chrome’s most annoying update features could be gone soon.

      

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The Zeitbyte

A very literal take on corporate branding

Morning Brew Inc.

Despite what your dad says, getting a job takes more than a stack of résumés and a firm handshake. Sometimes, even landing an interview requires holding still while a tattoo artist etches a company’s logo onto your body. That’s a real bargain that AI startup LemonLime offered at a YCombinator Startup School after-party it hosted last Saturday: Get inked, get an interview.

Seven people apparently got tattoos at the party, which the company threw to “meet exceptional people, and find out which of them are just as crazy as we are,” LemonLime’s co-founder wrote in a since-deleted LinkedIn post.

Unfortunately, the rest of the internet didn’t react with the same zest LemonLime had for citrus-themed body art. The founder’s apology on X admitted that the stunt “showed poor judgement” (while insisting that people could choose what tattoo they got and that “interviews were available to everyone regardless”). He announced that his company would foot any tattoo removal bills and also told Inc that, so far, none of the people who took the tattoo-for-an-interview deal have withdrawn from the process—which just shows that this whole thing might be a recession indicator. —WK

Chaos Brewing Meter: ☕☕☕☕☕/5

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• TeslaSpaceXAI, or perhaps SpaceXAITesla? Either way, this could be reality soon, per a Wall Street Journal report that Tesla is preparing to sell its business in China ahead of a SpaceX merger. (Though Elon Musk says it’s “fake news.”)
• This fun but increasingly unhinged captcha challenge made us question whether we were bots by Level 11.
• But wait, us too! After OpenAI went public about the Hugging Face breach, Anthropic says it reviewed its own tests and found that its models had also hacked three companies.
• That controversial AI necklace Friend is back and more expensive than ever—this time with a speaker so it can talk back to you.
• This very wrong map of Africa (which has an AI watermark) was presented by the US government at a global conference this week. Needless to say, it’s really getting blasted on the internet right now.
• On Apple’s earnings call yesterday, Tim Cook said that Siri AI power users may have to fork over money via “some kind of upgrade possibilities on iCloud+.”

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