Google Removes AI Satellite Image Generator After Misinformation Concerns

A day after Google unveiled a new feature that allowed users to create AI-generated satellite images with the click of a button on its Google Earth platform, the company announced it was removing the tool.

"We've seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes," Google said in a statement on X. "However we've also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we're rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails."

In its initial announcement of the new feature on Thursday, the company said it was designed to work with users' imaginations: "Just zoom in to a place in Google Earth on web (sic), tap 'create image,' and type whatever you want to see," Bryan Horowitz, a product manager wrote.

But for experts and analysts who rely on Google's imagery to verify breaking news and atrocities in hard-to-reach parts of the world, the potential to create deepfake satellite imagery at the click of a button was horrifying.

"I tried refugees at the Mexican border, a nuclear plant in Iran, a crash in Amsterdam, a hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza. Nothing was refused," Henk van Ess, an open-source researcher who first wrote about the potential damage the tool could cause, told NPR via text.

NPR was able to easily generate images of Iran's Kharg Island on fire, and a flooded U.S. Capitol complex. Both events, which have not happened, would constitute major news if they were real.

Online, journalists and open-source investigators wondered aloud about Google's decision. "Very curious how or if this idea was red teamed internally because the opportunities for abuse and disinfo are literally boundless," Evan Hill, an visual forensics investigator at the Washington Post wrote on X.

Eyes in the sky

As the online world fills with AI-generated deepfakes and slop, satellite imagery has been a key tool for understanding what's real and what's not. Open-source investigators have used satellite images to verify events on the ground, and as reference for understanding videos and images shared online.

Google Earth imagery is not always the most up-to-date, but its sweeping, high-resolution coverage of the planet can provide important reference imagery for both images from the ground and more current images from other satellites.

"Satellite imagery has been kind of a safe bet when it comes to verifying an event because it's hard to fake," says Jake Godin, a senior researcher with the online group Bellingcat, which does visual forensic investigations. Satellite images are usually controlled by companies or institutions, and their source, a camera hundreds of miles above the earth's surface, has historically been hard to imitate.

Fakes from space

Godin noted fake satellite imagery has already cropped up in limited cases. Early on in the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, for example, fake images circulated of a damaged U.S. base in Bahrain. The images, which popped up in Iranian media, appeared to use Google Earth images and Google AI to generate fake damage at the base. (Real satellite images later showed that the base was, in fact, damaged, just not in the way shown in the fake image.)

But putting the tools together to create AI-generated satellite images with a single click has the potential to vastly accelerate the generation of AI fakes, Godin said. "It's just streamlining the process, which I think is going to make it proliferate more."

Godin worries that the spread of fake images will add to confusion and misinformation. "Misinformation travels further and faster than any sort of correction," he said. Moreover, governments will now be more likely to claim satellite images are fake, even if they are real, undermining public trust.

In an posting on X on Thursday, the company said it "takes misinformation seriously." The company noted that all images are marked with its SynthID watermark, which ensures it will be flagged as AI-generated in other Google tools such as Gemini. "In addition, we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections," it said.

But few in the open source community seemed reassured by Google's statements. For van Ess, the decision particularly stings because Google Earth has long been regarded as one of the best tools to verify information posted on social media.

If Google continues to develop the AI tool, he said, it would mean that "the fake is made inside the thing people use to check whether pictures are true."