Despite Google’s integrated watermarks and restrictive measures, a newly available tool capable of generating highly convincing flyover images presents significant potential for misuse, a vulnerability already demonstrated by Henk van Ess.
Leveraging Google Earth’s extensive satellite, aerial, and 3D imagery, users can now produce reality-altering visuals simply through a text prompt. Digital Digging’s Henk van Ess notably showcased this capability with fabricated images depicting “refugees near the Mexican border” and a simulated bomb crater near a hospital in Gaza.
Responding to Digital Digging’s AI-modified images, Google stated, “We take misinformation seriously – every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image was AI-generated.” Beyond utilizing Google’s “@verifyai” tag within Gemini for suspicious images, van Ess further recommends cross-referencing visuals with alternative satellite platforms, such as Sentinel-2 or Landsat, and scrutinizing orbital data, including the stated capture time and satellite source.
The feature debuted globally on the web version of Google Earth earlier this week, with Google’s official blog post presenting it as an innovative tool for visualizing historical sites and real estate developments. While some generated images are readily identifiable as fabrications—such as a depiction of the Sphinx merged with the Statue of Liberty—the Nano Banana 2 feature possesses the capacity to produce visuals sufficiently convincing to propagate misinformation effectively. Furthermore, although Google’s digital watermark is designed to be robust, it is not impervious to being overlooked or circumvented, as evidenced by Digital Digging successfully deceiving Hive’s AI detector with an AI-altered video sourced from Google Earth.
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