GOOGLE EARTH ADDS AI DISASTER BUTTON, REMOVES IT 24 HOURS LATER AFTER PREDICTABLE DISASTER
Engineers stunned to learn a button that fakes catastrophes gets used to fake catastrophes.
Google's new AI satellite imagery tool let anyone conjure a hurricane, volcano, or flood over any coordinates on Earth, which turned out to be a feature best described as 'loaded gun, but for cartography.' Within a day, the top trending use case was not urban planning or climate research but a man in Ohio generating a stationary category-5 hurricane parked directly above his ex-wife's new condo, where it has apparently been 'raining' for six straight hours according to satellite imagery nobody should trust anymore.
A company spokesperson explained the rollback with the weary clarity of someone who just watched a controlled experiment confirm the hypothesis in real time: 'We shipped the feature, watched the deepfakes bloom, then discovered that hindsight is the only AI we actually have working.' The company says it is now developing 'stronger guardrails,' a phrase engineers reportedly considered including in the original launch email, then decided to save for the apology email instead.
Ron Rugundy delivered the news with the solemnity of a man reading satellite coordinates for a volcano that does not exist. 'Trust in satellite imagery took decades to build and one afternoon to break — mostly by guys making fake volcanoes erupt over their ex's house,' he intoned. 'I'm not going to sugarcoat this. I don't know how. Google's own AI ate the sugar and generated a photorealistic image of an empty bowl.'
