08/03/2026
On July 30th, without much fanfare, Google Earth unveiled an experimental new feature: the ability to produce custom deepfake satellite imagery with its inexplicably-named “Nano Banana 2” image generation model. As the press release explains, “Just zoom in to a place in Google Earth […], tap ‘create image,’ and type whatever you want to see.”
In a world increasingly filled with AI slop, satellite imagery has been one of the bastions of ground truth because it is very difficult to manipulate it without making it look unrealistic, and Google Earth is the most accessible and universally used tool for analysts, activists, and journalists to understand what is happening in the world.
It is somewhat baffling that Google actively degrade its own product that it has spent decades perfecting, and given the overwhelming backlash following the release of this new tool, its development suggests a degree of negligence on the part of tech giants to understand their own responsibilities to limit disinformation.
