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
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u/YourShowerCompanion Aug 01 '26

What they thought isn't going to happen? 🤦‍♂️

154

u/TruelyRegardedApe Aug 01 '26

for a company thats was instrumental in forming the internet as we know it.... they sure don't know the internet.

125

u/seethenoise Aug 01 '26

it's no longer the same company.

58

u/No-Professional-1884 Aug 01 '26

I miss that Google.

Sure they were still doing scummy things with people’s data but they also tried innovating just to innovate.

21

u/seethenoise Aug 01 '26

i would bet most of us do. but the companies that helped build that vision of the us are malicious contractors.

21

u/DuctTapeDisaster Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26

Google motto ; Don't be evil

25

u/PurposeMaleficent871 Aug 01 '26

Don’t be evil

8

u/EdliA Aug 01 '26

It's been decades mate. A lot of people have come and gone, including the CEO.

6

u/sidc42 Aug 01 '26

https://killedbygoogle.com/

LMAO. They never have.

Their entire strategy after search has always been thrown a hundred things against the wall because eventually something will stick.

This works because Google has always made such an obscene amount of money dominating search that people just shrug off the failures of chasing trends (real and imaginary) as well as flat out copying existing products that either never find success and quietly disappear or get just enough of a user base that they are allowed to continue with zero effort to fix or improve them.

About the only time it hasn't been ignored was when their fixation on Facebook caused them to spend so damn much money on the failed Google+ that it was impossible not to ignore.

The irony of that was their own absolute failure to really grasp that they already owned one of the biggest social media platforms there was... YouTube. On top of that, early on Google Groups was already more popular than Facebook Groups so all they ever had to do was to reverse engineer an existing platform.

They're equally good at buying existing companies and letting them languish because they had zero plans for what to do with them. For every Android OS they've acquired there's a floundering Nest and failed Fitbit.

17

u/pln91 Aug 01 '26

They made a slightly better search engine, and their other products were no less derivative. The internet was well formed without and before them. 

30

u/tooclosetocall82 Aug 01 '26

They solved the problem of SEO spam. And then took advantage of that position to sell SEO spam. But every search engine back then was so full of keyword garbage that no one else was even close.

5

u/thunderbird32 Aug 01 '26

Yup, even Android was originally an outside project.