For a Day, Google Made It Easy to Spoof Satellite Imagery

For 20 years, Google Earth has been one of the most powerful tools used by journalists, governments and investigators to verify events and debunk falsehoods.

For about 24 hours beginning on Thursday, the tool became even more potent, when a six-word instruction — “type whatever you want to see” — allowed billions of Google Earth users worldwide to use a new artificial intelligence feature to create deepfake aerial images.

That wasn’t exactly the company’s intention, of course.

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.

Instead, the feature led to open-source intelligence researchers, journalists and others showing how easily the tool could be used to generate very realistic nuclear power plants, refugee camps along any border, burned forests, flooded cities and even a fatal car crash.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/technology/google-earth-ai-satellite-images.html