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Good grief, they're really going to force everyone into using Copernicus if they have something slightly resembling a desire to be truthful

PM eats a bunch of peyote, comes back with this dumb shit. Only explanation.

People will use this to create fabricated imagery that they can reuse in other places/documents/social media accounts/fabricated news stories.

I guess if you *want* a cruise missile or drone to hit say a girls school in Iran by “mistake” this could be useful. I guess.

I'd welcome @bellingcat.com take on this move from Google...

OMG, I read out your "GenAI" as if it were a Gen X or Gen Z. Oops!

it better go doofff like in the games (I think the plants themselves didn't use the buzz noise, only the lines, it's been a while)

I'm pretty certain thats where the LLM got the image from.

Conservatives are making war on the concept of empirical reality, and Google is controlled by conservatives.

epistemic chaos is an excellent growth medium for fascism

Oddly enough, I noticed yesterday that Google Maps has the entire city of Minsk and its surroundings completely bleached out. Not blurred, like some special military installation, but bleached of colour, and quite useless as a map.

It's incredible to me that we are creating GenAI tools for people who probably shouldn't be trusted with a Zippo lighter. 🤔

Sick 🔥burn🔥, Faine. Well Done! 👍🏻👍👍🏼👍🏿👍🏼

featuring a colossal cross; and here is how it is rendered by Google Earth Pro, which does a good job at guessing the 3D shape of the hill, but not such a good job with the cross. (Fallen and squashed down onto the ground).

The Mac version hasn't been updated for "Apple silicon" processes--a trivial recompile, I think?--so it will quit working in fall of 2027 when Apple stops including the built-in Rosetta 2 emulation layer. I will be pleasantly surprised if Google updates it for "Apple silicon."

Personally, I'm pinning all my hopes to OSMAnd. osmand.net

Oops All Evil

They should at least open source these things. I'm dreading when they kill Google Earth VR (still my favorite VR app, please don't tell me they've killed it)

Sad to see a useful tool gutted I used it for work to figure out the number of cemeteries in the US and the distribution of their sizes. I joke that I’m the foremost leading cemetery market sizing expert. Rip to a real one

that was a fun death, novel product built on the thing whoops

GSA remains

There’s so many GIS-adjacent folks that are gonna be fucking livid when they can’t install google earth on a new machine. The web-based stuff shits the bed with big/complex datasets. Sounds like GIS folks are gonna have to go back to making a lot of pdfs. Joy.

Is Google Earth Engine on the chopping block too?

scammers, cheaters, memesters, fascist governments, the usual gang of fantastic people

Not the main point here at all, but the nuclear plant they added to the image in the headline looks laughably fake to me.

It's a plague of Generalized Public Stupidity, friend.

Oh god

It’s bonkers!

The company that brought us the .pdf TLD? I can’t imagine.

Techbros can't touch anything without ruining it can they?

Sometimes “irresponsible” just isn’t a strong word. What the fucking were they (not) thinking!! NOTHING good can come of this.

Google+ ass strategy.

There's likely an element of that - like when they went all in on Google+ a generation ago, internally they've been told that all bets must now be Gemini bets...

“Make the Sphinx look like Pinnochio”

“I am a product manager and I need to release something new with generative AI to get promoted“

Back in my day, we used our imaginations for that. Worked just as well, and didn't lead to misinformation slop.

bro it’s called GIS

I'm pretty sure people were doing things like this before genAI, and continue to be able to do it without that.

There truly is no realistic business model for this thing.

I respect your opinion and experience. From a product perspective, I see the utility in some of them. Whether or not the market agrees is an open question

Another post. Good news. The EU is putting some overdue regulation on AI bsky.app/profile/wend...

Crop circles In the shape of baseball team logos to prove that by the time they got here, the aliens were upset the Dodgers moved west

Visualizing the Illiad would require some serious age-restrictions, and I'm not talking about the battle scenes

They’re all fucking stupid.

Here are a couple of examples. Each image took me ~3 hours while watching TV. The left maps use real roads and parks with the zoom in to the town of New Thrace being made of a rotated Tulare. Using GIS let me manipulate details to make a plausible fake place. 1/

hey Grok, show me Caecilius est in horto

the goal is always to get a thing done without having to pay a person to do it, not so much to maximize profit as to maximize control the tech bros want slaves

There's an absolute ton of research on why genAI historical imagery is bad and how to create actual good reconstructions.

I was just wondering what it would show for al-Manṣūr’s Baghdad, but not enough to actually ask it.

You can falsify the present to falsify history. Two birds with one stone.

I mean, they recently put out a statement on the lines of “we know we’re miserably failing on our climate targets, but we like AI more than we like keeping CO2 emissions down so we’re not sorry.” They haven’t given a shit in a while.

Google should have to go through an IRB review process every time it makes a product change. The slowness and cumbersomeness of the process should be exactly proportional to the number of people who would be affected by the product.

Yes.

I've done something marginally similar ("here's what it will look like if we put up the building in this project proposal") and even for that this doesn't seem like it would work

One use case: people have started to use GenAI to push back against redevelopment proposals, but I'm not sure that "We can all make heaps and heaps of shitty thoughtless renderings!" is really going to improve an already fractious public process. bsky.app/profile/imag...

Gemini, riddle me this: when did Google change from "Do no evil" to "Do mo' evil"?

“Maybe if people think this is cool, then we can trick them into using our AI products for everything?” That seems to be the main business model across the industry?

It’s hard to see what they expect to gain from this.

Expanding on the Gulf of America is what they’re doing

Are open source maps safe from this degeneration?

Google Maps is their most used app, and yet they want to undermine it? I can't understand this decision.

The commoditization of truth. Destroy credibility in government, privatize access, control the information domain and rule the world. This is the definition of evil.

A "fun feature"! Whee!

this was (kinda) a plot point in Battlefield 6 btw…🥀😭

No.

There aren’t any.

Perhaps Google is playing Sim City?

What on earth? Justifying their AI capex bubble

It’ll be free only until a targeted amount of users have been identified. Goes behind a monthly sub paywall after that.

People have been fact-checking the Bible for at least 150 years. Bishop John Colenso argued against the historical accuracy of the Pentateuch in the 1860s and 70s.

And the resulting war is really going to drive revenue over in Google's defense business unit, and it's all just exponential synergies from here on out, no possible downside to any of this.

it's like a shot out of dune 2. they put the concrete down first at least

Sure, people may die as a result of this, but are you prepared to countenance the horror of Sergey Brin wanting to take a yacht trip with some friends, his main yacht needing repairs, and the backup yacht doesn’t have a cool chandelier in the billiards room? Can you live with that scenario?

There is no justification for this, it’s so stupid and dangerous

Oh.. oh no... no no no

"Don't be evil" smth...

The worst behaviour as a service. Yep. That sums up the whole shebang.

🙂

Yeah, but like, what else could it do to make AI the center of everything?! /s

This is high order irresponsible software. How can they not expect a ton of blowback or even multiple lawsuits!?! 🤬

Sim City WW3 looking really neat.

That motto change to "do more evil" is really making a difference!

People that pooh-pooh'd all of us who talked about the malevolence of Project 2025 back in 2023 are now doing the same when we keep on stating that AI is a dangerous tool of tech titans: "You sound like a conspiracy nut" or "Omg. Give it a rest".

Worse than asbestos. I'd say it's the leaded fuel of the internet. Even if you don't use it yourself, its effects get everywhere.

This is so utterly baffling.

I don't want to say you're right but...

"Thought Leadership" should be at least a spicy felony if not much worse.