Google Earth's AI makeover survives one trip around the Sun
As AI and misinformation expert Henk van Ess noted in his Digital Digging blog, "What on earth is Google doing?"The AI misinformation genie has long left its bottle when it comes to imagery. However, putting a photorealistic image generator inside Google Earth and expecting only harmless fun shows Microsoft Tay levels of naivete. In retrospect, Tay, the AI chatbot that netizens persuaded to spew some impressively hateful tweets, offered a warning back in 2016 of what was coming down the line.Google has not permanently pulled the plug.
- ▪As AI and misinformation expert Henk van Ess noted in his Digital Digging blog, "What on earth is Google doing?"The AI misinformation genie has long left its bottle when it comes to imagery.
- ▪However, putting a photorealistic image generator inside Google Earth and expecting only harmless fun shows Microsoft Tay levels of naivete.
- ▪In retrospect, Tay, the AI chatbot that netizens persuaded to spew some impressively hateful tweets, offered a warning back in 2016 of what was coming down the line.Google has not permanently pulled the plug.
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| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/03/google-earths-ai-makeover-survives-one-trip-around-the-sun/5282224 |
| Publication time | Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:58:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-03T13:00:46.731Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-03T13:00:46.731Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | j2EFGuymSffK · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
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| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); AI AND ML Google Earth's AI makeover survives one trip around the Sun Turns out letting anyone rewrite the planet with a prompt had drawbacks Richard Speed Richard Speed MICROSOFT ECOSYSTEM REPORTER Published mon 3 Aug 2026 // 13:58 UTC Google performed a remarkably brisk reverse ferret last week, launching AI image generation in Google Earth and yanking it the next day after certain sections of the internet did the inevitable.This is how it began: "Today we're bringing AI image…
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