Google switched off the Nano Banana 2 image generator inside Google Earth about 24 hours after launching it, after OSINT researchers showed a single prompt could paste fake nuclear plants, refugee crowds and bombed hospitals onto real satellite maps.
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Transcript
Google put an AI image generator inside Google Earth on Thursday. By Friday it was gone. The feature ran on Nano Banana 2. You zoomed to any real place, typed a sentence, and it redrew the satellite view. Open source researchers took about a day to break it. Henk van Ess dropped a nuclear plant into Iran and a crowd of refugees at the border. Others made a bombed hospital in Gaza and Russian tanks in Kyiv. Google's defense was SynthID, an invisible watermark. But the thing that spread was a screenshot, and a screenshot loses the visible label while the invisible one needs Google's own tools to read. Investigators use Earth to check other people's claims. That is why this one mattered. The fake inherits the credibility of the map it was born on.