Google Earth briefly let you generate AI images from satellite imagery — then Google pulled it - Yahoo Tech

Update: Google has now disabled the feature after seeing "people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies." The original story follows.

Generative AI is being deployed in everything these days, so it makes some sense that Google Earth would eventually get its time in the sun too. This week, Google added its Nano Banana 2 generative AI tool to Google Earth, letting you type just about anything you can think up to transform the landscape.

Google is billing this as a way to "visualize history, create real estate plans, and more." The more includes things like creating custom infographics about a place, visualizing building projects before they start, or just having fun visualizing what a future version of the area might look like. Your results, however, might be a little mixed.

We used the tool to envision what a nearby neighborhood might look like in the year 2190. After a little over a minute of thinking on it, Nano Banana 2 spat out an overhead view of the area with some somewhat futuristic-looking glass roofs, electric cars on the streets and a lot more greenery. Puzzlingly, it also added a futuristic HUD over the image detailing air quality, transit and power grid statuses for some reason.

The folks at ZDNet got early access to Nano Banana 2 in Google Earth and ran into some hitches as well. Notably, it doesn't work on the street view level, so you're limited there unless you want to take a screenshot to feed into Gemini to generate an image. Other issues included garbled text in generated infographics, altered layouts and more.

Clearly, Nano Banana 2 isn't quite as capable as it might seem at first glance with Google Earth, but you can likely play around with it for a few minutes of fun. Unfortunately, it's also easy to see how this sort of thing might be abused to spread disinformation.

This post was originally published at 12:13 p.m. ET on July 31. It has since been updated to note that Google has disabled this feature.