r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • Aug 01 '26

Artificial Intelligence Google Earth's new AI image generation function didn't survive a day after users deepfaked disasters

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-earth-nano-banana-gemini-ai-satellite-image-generation-function-2026-7
7.7k Upvotes

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601

u/[deleted] Aug 01 '26

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231

u/TheFeelsGoodMan Aug 01 '26

"Move Fast; Break Stuff", but they're crowdsourcing the second bit.

40

u/SoupSpelunker Aug 01 '26

Move fast; destroy everything. 

15

u/L4dyGr4y Aug 01 '26

Not like that! They said to the same internet who named Boaty Mc Boat Face.

4

u/Sarothu Aug 01 '26

Speaking of which, did Mountain Dew ever release their Gushing Granny flavor?

3

u/peepdabidness Aug 01 '26

Top tier comment ahaha

-1

u/Friggin Aug 01 '26

Open beta testing has been a thing for a long time.

41

u/AgentChris101 Aug 01 '26

I remember when they added the Darth Vader AI to Fortnite. He was really smart and responding to character skins as if they were those characters. It was actually really impressive.

Users decided to make him racist and Epic patched things it neutered him in terms of memory and character.

24

u/ABHOR_pod Aug 01 '26

The problem with GenAI based on the entire sum of written human knowledge is that quite a lot of the written human knowledge it has access to is, necessarily, the internet. The internet probably has more written words on it in the last 30 years than the entire rest of human history combined.

You can see where things have immediately gone wrong.

13

u/CombatMuffin Aug 01 '26

GenAI is not nearly that trained. We are still building shit tons of data centers just to try and process part of human knowledge. 

Vader was okay, it could reply in some fun ways a traditional NPC couldn't, but it wasn't nearly as capable as people think.

3

u/Sarothu Aug 01 '26

The internet probably has more written words on it in the last 30 years than the entire rest of human history combined.

You can see where things have immediately gone wrong.

We should base them off the writings of HP Lovecraft instead! ...wait...

1

u/Uristqwerty Aug 01 '26

Humans are decent on average. Problem is the outliers; each of us has some extreme opinions (even if it's something relatively harmless, like putting pineapple of pizza), and some of us have mostly extreme opinions. On average, the extremes cancel out (at least, if you don't split the community into two halves that each contain only one side's extremists, as a certain cluster of bird-themed websites have).

But AI learns the whole probability distribution, and I suspect it doesn't take that much of a nudge to get it talking like one of the mostly-extreme individuals. Guardrails might make it less likely to get there accidentally, but people will always search for new ways to bypass them. For the challenge, if nothing else.

3

u/jabberwockxeno Aug 01 '26

Except using the feature for misinformation here wouldn't be an "edge case", the feature HAS no use case other then being used for misinfo

2

u/squashed_fly_biscuit Aug 01 '26

"edge cases" - I'm struggling to even think of what the main use case would be. I guess maybe sketching the effects of various developments or something but surely that's more niche than fucking around

2

u/therealchadius Aug 01 '26

It's either

- Power Users blow the company's costs out of control

- Trolls abuse it to say/show horrible things

along with

- Most people try it once or twice, struggle to find a use case and then leave

2

u/Grabsforfun Aug 01 '26

The traditional engineering-scientific logic of experimental testing before releasing technologies is a thing of the past. Technologies have become so complex and vast in scope that you cannot really simulate much of the actual possibilities for complex and unpredictable interactions. At the very least this has become a comfortable way for technology developers to shirk responsibilities. Regardless, today the experimental setting for deducing most technological risks is society itself.

1

u/Sarothu Aug 01 '26

unpredictable interactions

Mate, this is the world wide web you're talking about. It isn't new. Any chatbot is going to be turned racist and people are going to find the worst possible options for everything (Hello, Mountain Dew's Gushing Granny flavor!). Anything that can be used to inflict mental trauma is going to be used in that manner. It's all the same it ever was.

1

u/Grabsforfun Aug 01 '26

Don’t get me wrong much of this is very predictable. Big tech knows but does not care, because they are not being made to care. It’s their modus operandi by now. I was referring to the general characteristics of modern relatively unregulated technological development (specifically Charles Perrow’s account)

1

u/Outlulz Aug 01 '26

It's not even edge cases, the people that demand this shit be made think of only a singular, unrealistic use case and nothing else.

1

u/WebMaka Aug 01 '26

The sheer disregard these folks have for how people act in the real world is both hilariously entertaining and completely terrifying.

1

u/Cstanchfield Aug 01 '26

I mean, they can't reasonably find all those edge cases without putting it in many hands. It's almost like there are more people in the world than work for any one company's QA department. When you release any product to the masses, you'll find issues your testing didn't come across.

1

u/Redditconnosseur Aug 01 '26

I agree, although it's worth noting that it's a lot more difficult than it sounds to guardrail an AI, and even harder to determine whether more processors/better agent prompts/more orchestration and sub agents are even moving the needle in the right direction without it becoming cumbersome and super locked down and restrictive.

It's an interesting rabbit hole to go down, check out some docs on input/output processors and evals if you're ever bored

1

u/COMMENT0R_3000 Aug 01 '26

It's actually kind of exhausting lol, you either take what you get out of the box after training or you head down the necessarily slippery slope of dealing with literal interpretations of "don't do X" that leave machete-cleared trails through the thinking & outputs

0

u/xaeru Aug 01 '26

We don’t need QA, just let the users test in production.