Google Earth’s New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Completely Bullshit Satellite Images
Now, Google Earth can easily be used as a tool for disinformation. In 404 Media’s tests, we were able to add skyscrapers to a rural area, added a “homeless encampment” to a part of Los Angeles where homelessness has become a major political issue, and were able to add a “bomb blast and crater” to an area of Los Angeles. 0:00 /0:35 1× “Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border.
- ▪Now, Google Earth can easily be used as a tool for disinformation.
- ▪In 404 Media’s tests, we were able to add skyscrapers to a rural area, added a “homeless encampment” to a part of Los Angeles where homelessness has become a major political issue, and were able to add a “bomb blast and crater” to an area o
- ▪0:00 /0:35 1× “Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border.
404 Media files mainly under tech. We currently carry 63 of its stories.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | 404 Media |
| Canonical URL | https://www.404media.co/google-earths-new-ai-lets-anyone-fabricate-completely-bullshit-satellite-images/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:03:08 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-31T16:08:08.157Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-31T16:08:08.157Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 7mcWThQ4zHcd · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
On Thursday, Google introduced a new AI feature into Google Earth which lets anyone fabricate all sorts of misleading or straight up inaccurate satellite imagery, from making it look like a specific place has suffered a drone strike to manifesting a nuclear plant in Iran.Usually, Google Earth is an exceptionally useful tool for open source intelligence (OSINT) analysts to digitally monitor areas of interest and see how they change over time, say, during a conflict or disaster. Now, Google Earth can easily be used as a tool for disinformation.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at 404 Media.
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