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I used to do some work on the ethical use of satellite and drone imagery for aid and disaster response, and it is genuinely hard to express in words what a dangerous, stupid thing Google is doing by making it easy to use GenAI to create faked satellite imagery:

I'm trying to figure out what the imagined non-evil utility of this is supposed to be. Why would people want the ability to add random shit to Google Earth images? Is this just a case of "we need to figure out how to shoehorn generative AI into every product?"

Google put out a five-point bullet list of supposed use cases, it is, uh, not wildly convincing. My 'favorite' is 'have the stochastic parrot show your students what historical sites looked like in olden days'. blog.google/products-and...