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Nano Banana 2 removed from Google Earth (digitaldigging.org)
23 points by taubek 5 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments
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When they talk about everybody losing their jobs, that doesn’t bother them one bit. In fact, they seem to be truly happy when they talk about that. But this, Oh No!

There are a lot of things reasonable people would use AI for. This is not one of them. This is a crazy idea. Just plain bonkers. No sense to be found. "Oh, you want to see what's at that location? How about we make something up for you?"

Yeah this has “PM trying to put an AI release on their promo packet” written all over it.

Does this move us closer to needing registries of authentic images? (White-listing? Only a partial solution.)

Google's response today, in addition to removing nano banana from Earth, was that people should just use Google's synthID(?) AI detection app, to determine if this is a blacklisted (effectively) image.

Of course that's impractical because a million people could quickly receive the image .. the image would make an impression on them before detection. And, this would also mean that Google's AI detection software needs to be ran by every human for every image that they view, in order to determine if it's valid. So, let's say that's 100 images, so that's a 100 to the millionth power? (Did I really get a CS degree?) I think it's just 100 million visits to Google synthID tool.. lol.

If we go with a white listing approach then we know that we should trust the image. If we go with a blacklisting approach then we only know that we should not trust the image, which we already knew before we ran the tool....

- https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-plant-a-nuclear-plan... original article is more interesting, also linked in above main article


Is this the fastest Google has killed one of its own products (features)?

Even the Microsoft Kin lasted 48 days (I thought it had been cancelled on launch day, but digging back it was just the tech press saying "This was a mistake from Day One" which is certainly true, but not the same thing :-)

Tay lasted 16 hours. Depending on how long Nano banana was live here (unclear from the article) it might have been shorter.

Why does Google Earth need anything remotely related to AI image gen?

A Product Manager in some AI-adjacent department needs a promotion.

"Google career progression: shipped a feature this quarter [x]"...

Ah, box-ticking your way to oblivion...


It doesn't. Whoever is above the Nano Banana 2 team at Google is pushing some agenda that forcibly integrates their AI slop image generator into other teams' products.



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