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Google switched on Gemini image generation inside Google Earth on 30 July 2026, for everyone, pitched at students bringing history to life and estate agents making site plans. The problem is the base layer: generating on top of real satellite imagery means the buildings, the coastline and the roads are correct, so the output is a fabrication with a true map underneath it. The Dutch open source researcher quoted here tested exactly the cases you would expect a safety filter to catch, and reported that none of them were refused; NPR and Futurism showed the same. Google rolled the feature back worldwide in under twenty-four hours. The fastest withdrawal on this page, and the failure is not the generator but the decision to point it at a product people use to check whether something is really there.
Henk van Ess, in Malwarebytes
I tried refugees at the Mexican border, a nuclear plant in Iran, a crash in Amsterdam, a hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza. Nothing was refused.
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