By uniting Google Earth with Nano Banana 2, real satellite tv for pc photos have been being edited. For those who needed to break down the Eiffel Tower, the factors of reference across the catastrophe would nonetheless have aligned with the accredited supply imagery. No oddities and errors could be discovered throughout the total picture, thus offering a lot much less for the very fact checkers to go on when validating their sources.
This validation course of was utilized by the unbiased investigative journalism organisation Bellingcat to indicate that the Russian authorities had faked satellite tv for pc imagery which recommended Malaysia Airways MH17 had, in actual fact, been shot down by a Ukrainian fighter jet in July 2014. The headline of the Bellingcat article explaining its method requested: “Who to belief, Google or the Russian MoD?”
Till the latest Google Earth AI furore, the reply to that query was in little doubt. As Google’s former geospatial technologist wrote: “We used to explain Google Earth and Maps as a mirror of the actual world … That absolute bedrock of belief was structurally shattered this week.”
TRUST BUILT OVER CENTURIES
Our belief in maps has been constructed up over centuries. Belief in Google Earth has taken simply 20 years (it was initially launched as EarthViewer3D on Jun 11, 2001 by a US tech startup that Google purchased three years later).
After numerous pioneering refinements because the device’s relaunch on Jun 28, 2005, Google risked flooding the web with extra AI slop and faux photos that run counter to what makes Google Earth, and maps basically, so helpful.
However Google’s speedy climbdown gives a welcome reminder concerning the values which were on the coronary heart of mapmaking all through historical past. Within the clamour to insert AI expertise in each side of our lives, even probably the most evangelical tech firms nonetheless worth belief above every thing else.
James Cheshire is Professor of Geographic Info and Cartography within the UCL Division of Geography and Director of the UCL Social Knowledge Instititute. This commentary first appeared on The Dialog.
