Google pauses AI satellite images, after fears of deepfakes in the sky

A day after Google unveiled a new feature that allowed users to create AI-generated satellite images with the click of a button on its Google Earth platform, the company announced it was removing the tool.

"We've seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes," Google said in a statement on X. "However we've also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we're rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails."

In its initial announcement of the new feature on Thursday, the company said it was designed to work with users' imaginations: "Just zoom in to a place in Google Earth on web (sic), tap 'create image,' and type whatever you want to see," Bryan Horowitz, a product manager wrote.

But for experts and analysts who rely on Google's imagery to verify breaking news and atrocities in hard-to-reach parts of the world, the potential to create deepfake satellite imagery at the click of a button was horrifying.

"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," Henk van Ess, an open-source researcher who first wrote about the potential damage the tool could cause, told NPR via text.

NPR was able to easily generate images of Iran's Kharg Island on fire, and a flooded U.S. Capitol complex. Both events, which have not happened, would constitute major news if they were real.

Online, journalists and open-source investigators wondered aloud about Google's decision. "Very curious how or if this idea was red teamed internally because the opportunities for abuse and disinfo are literally boundless," Evan Hill, an visual forensics investigator at the Washington Post wrote on X.

As the online world fills with AI-generated deepfakes and slop, satellite imagery has been a key tool for understanding what's real and what's not. Open-source investigators have used satellite images to verify events on the ground, and as reference for understanding videos and images shared online.

Google Earth imagery is not always the most up-to-date, but its sweeping, high-resolution coverage of the planet can provide important reference imagery for both images from the ground and more current images from other satellites.

"Satellite imagery has been kind of a safe bet when it comes to verifying an event because it's hard to fake," says Jake Godin, a senior researcher with the online group Bellingcat, which does visual forensic investigations. Satellite images are usually controlled by companies or institutions, and their source, a camera hundreds of miles above the earth's surface, has historically been hard to imitate.

Godin noted fake satellite imagery has already cropped up in limited cases. Early on in the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, for example, fake images circulated of a damaged U.S. base in Bahrain. The images, which popped up in Iranian media, appeared to use Google Earth images and Google AI to generate fake damage at the base. (Real satellite images later showed that the base was, in fact, damaged, just not in the way shown in the fake image.)

But putting the tools together to create AI-generated satellite images with a single click has the potential to vastly accelerate the generation of AI fakes, Godin said. "It's just streamlining the process, which I think is going to make it proliferate more."

Godin worries that the spread of fake images will add to confusion and misinformation. "Misinformation travels further and faster than any sort of correction," he said. Moreover, governments will now be more likely to claim satellite images are fake, even if they are real, undermining public trust.

In an posting on X on Thursday, the company said it "takes misinformation seriously." The company noted that all images are marked with its SynthID watermark, which ensures it will be flagged as AI-generated in other Google tools such as Gemini. "In addition, we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections," it said.

But few in the open source community seemed reassured by Google's statements. For van Ess, the decision particularly stings because Google Earth has long been regarded as one of the best tools to verify information posted on social media.

If Google continues to develop the AI tool, he said, it would mean that "the fake is made inside the thing people use to check whether pictures are true."

I used to live at a small Navy communications station near Andrews AFB in Maryland...

I went back to visit it about 20 years later when I was back in that area in a rented car, and decided to pay a visit. The base was not in use, the main gate was gone, and there was just one of those barrier arms across that road that was stuck in an upright position, so...I just drove onto the old base.

It was deserted, but largely looked like it had when I left it. I was even able to go to our old family quarters and go inside the house, the door was open and the front yard was dug up.

It was neat.

Then, when I went to another part of the base where a gigantic parabola about 100 feet across that they used to bounce military messages to the other side off the moon used to be, it was gone. I was about to go down and check out the place on the base my Boy Scout Troop used to camp at, but I noticed a camera on a pole pointed right at me, and decided I had seen enough, and left.

Some years after that, when Google Earth became a thing, my brother and I would go on Google Earth and look up all the places we had lived, and this old Naval communication station in Maryland was one of them. It was fun, we could see our old house and the fields near the parabola we use to play games at, though that giant dish was gone. At the lower right corner, I could even see the swampy area I had gone swimming in a nasty creek and got leeches on me!

What was odd though, that even though there were many things that had not changed on the base since we lived there (you could even see the shadow from the large water tower at about the 10 O'Clock position of the yellow push pin) where the fields were we used to play in near Ammon Drive near the bottom, there was now what looked like a runway. We looked at it and didn't think it was a real runway with taxiways, it was a bit of a puzzle. That part of the base, the whole lower half of the image had been built up.

When you look at the image I posted above, you can still see the long road straight road coming into the upper left corner of the image diagonally which is lined by trees, leading to where the main gate was, but that little barrier arm was gone.

There was a sign that said "DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY COUNTERTERRORISM UNIT" and as I drove down that long straight road, there was now a huge glass and concrete structures that stretched across the road.

I had the very real feeling that, like Frodo going on the road into Mordor, there were a lot of lidless, sleepless eyes, an automated system that had run my plate number, with my personal information being displayed on many screens!

As I drove up the the gate which looked like extremely thick bulletproof glass, a guard came over and looked at me expectantly. I stammered something like "Er, I used to live on this base, and was driving by to visit it, but...I guess that isn't going to happen now?" He didn't say a word, but nodded his head side to side slowly in the negative, and when I asked if I could turn around, he pointed to how I could do it, and I did.

When I got home, I went on Google Earth, and when I looked at the satellite image, it was an image taken BEFORE the image above. Those old structures like the fields we played in and the old parabola antenna were there.

I then figured out that what we thought might have been an airstrip, was more likely a defensive driving training course where agents train how to handle various traffic elements if there were hostiles attacking.

At the time after I saw the image above, Google must have been handed an image by the government and told to display that old image instead. I just went back and looked at it now, and it seems like a more current picture, so someone must have decided it wasn't worth the effort to conceal what was going on there anymore.

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