New Google Earth AI tool could fuel misinformation, experts say

Google Earth’s New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Completely Bullshit Satellite Images

"Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam."

Google research shows the fast rise of AI-generated misinformation | CBC News

From fake images of war to celebrity hoaxes, AI technology has spawned new forms of reality-warping misinformation online. New analysis co-authored by Google researchers shows just how quickly the problem has grown.

Google Researchers Say AI Now Leading Disinformation Vector (and Are Severely Undercounting the Problem)

It’s much easier to produce AI-generated disinformation than it is to fact check it.

An AI-Generated Content Empire Is Spreading Fake Celebrity Images on Google

A ring of websites using AI and run by an aspiring movie star are behind fake celebrity images featured in Google results, Motherboard found.

Google Just Ruined One of Its Most Important Tools

Google Earth was a boon for researchers—and then came the deepfakes.

Google Gemini is getting better at identifying AI fakes

Hey Gemini, is this image AI?

Will Google’s AI hype man kill the BBC?

Matt Brittin spent two decades at Google, a tech company helping to destroy journalism. His appointment as leader of Britain’s biggest news organisation represents an existential threat, writes Carole Cadwalladr

Identifying AI-generated images with SynthID

Today, in partnership with Google Cloud, we’re beta launching SynthID, a new tool for watermarking and identifying AI-generated images. It’s being released to a limited number of Vertex AI customers using Imagen, one of our latest text-to-image models that uses input text to create photorealistic images. This technology embeds a digital watermark directly into the pixels of an image, making it imperceptible to the human eye, but detectable for identification. While generative AI can unlock huge creative potential, it also presents new risks, like creators spreading false information — both intentionally or unintentionally. Being able to identify AI-generated content is critical to empowering people with knowledge of when they’re interacting with generated media, and for helping prevent the spread of misinformation.

Tracking AI-enabled Misinformation: 3,749 AI Content Farm sites (and Counting), Plus the Top False Claims Generated by Artificial Intelligence Tools

Coverage by McKenzie Sadeghi, Dimitris Dimitriadis, Virginia Padovese, Giulia Pozzi, Sara Badilini, Chiara Vercellone,  Natalie Huet, Zack Fishman, Leonie Pfaller, and Natalie Adams | Last Updated June 23, 2026

Google made a watermark for AI images that you can’t edit out

For now, SynthID works only in Google’s ecosystem — but it could someday be all over the internet

AI Images Detectors Are Being Used to Discredit the Real Horrors of War

Online AI image detecting tools that may or may not work are labeling real photographs from the war in Israel and Palestine as fake, creating what a world leading expert called a “second level of disinformation.”