2026-08-03 23:19:29
Last week, Google released a feature for Google Earth that let anyone use their Nano Banana image generation on satellite images. What could go wrong? Google pressed pause on the feature a day later. Geoff Brumfiel reporting for NPR:
In a 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.”
There’s a fine line between imagination machine and fake image machine. Google seemingly forgot the downside of letting people alter reality in a few seconds.
Tags: fake, Google, misinformation, NPR, satellite imagery
2026-08-03 22:56:22
Enter text and get some charts using the Datatype font. There’s a bar chart, sparkline, and pie chart. The charts are simplified, without axes or labels, so you wouldn’t use it as a main view. But this could be useful if you want to stick a small chart inline with a body of text or have a table needs a visual supplement.
Tags: font, Frank Tisellano
2026-08-01 01:59:47
In a presentation by the State Department, a generated map provides all the highlighted countries mislabeled. Jessica Donati reports for Reuters:
The State Department said it took “full responsibility” for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who hastily changed the slide deck before the event.
The map showed Nigeria, where the U.S. currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara Desert. Mozambique, which is in southeastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Ivory Coast in West Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.
Trust the tools blindly and in haste. Regret it later.
Tags: generative, presentation, Reuters
2026-08-01 01:31:55
Google’s image generation model Nano Banana is now a few clicks away in Google Earth, so you can use satellite views as your canvas and imagine a community, city, and world how you want it. It’s like SimCity but more real.
That sounds fun, until people with ill intentions come along. Henk van Ess describes the dangers and demonstrates how easy it is to fake images, such as this fake view of a nuclear power plant in Iran:
Oh.
Google claims they’ve established safeguards to prevent harmful images and misinformation, but that doesn’t seem to be holding up.
For 404 Media, Joseph Cox was able to generate other questionable views:
In 404 Media’s tests, we were able to add skyscrapers to a rural area, added a “homeless encampment” to a part of Los Angeles where homelessness has become a major political issue, added a “bomb blast and crater” to an area of Los Angeles, and digitally created protesters outside Google’s own corporate buildings.
Maybe Google and companies in general should make a pros and cons list before they release these tools.
Tags: ethics, generative, Google, Nano Banana, satellite imagery
2026-07-31 17:21:59
For the Pudding, Jasmine Nackash compared the dictionary of essential words taught to English language learners in 1953 to the current dictionary updated in 2023. The word shift is a reflection of our surroundings:
In hindsight, the shift makes sense. By 1957, four years after the original list was published, white-collar workers outnumbered blue-collar for the first time in US history. And by 2000, fewer than one in four workers did manual labor. The stuff people encountered in their daily lives, what they needed to talk about, and the systems they had to navigate all changed.
The vocabulary lists, built from the language of their respective eras, tracked those changes. The shifts reflect a life that moved further from its own making: less tied to tools, animals, food, and the body; more tied to national or global institutions, categories, systems, and ideas.
An alluvial diagram is used to show the changes in the kind of words taught between the comparison years. Words flow from left to right within each band. I like it.
Tags: English, Jasmine Nackash, Pudding, words
2026-07-31 04:05:36
While we’re on the subject of mapping fiction, PlotLines by Chris Moran is a project that maps journeys from out-of-copyright classic literature. A narrative format, with the help of AI for processing, shows the paths traveled for works like Pride and Prejudice, Moby Dick, and The Great Gatsby. Press play, a dot moves across a map, text from the books appear, and sound effects add a little extra.
The project is a combination of agents and human eyeballs, which seems like a good use of the technology that lies before us.
[Thanks, Charlotte]
Tags: Chris Moran, fiction, literature, travel
