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Playing around generating images with AI is a whole lot of fun… up until it isn’t. At some point, someone’s going to make a particularly controversial image, or maybe try to pass off a fake as the real thing, or even just rip off a real artist’s work. Yesterday, Google announced it was bringing Gemini’s Nano Banana 2 image generation to Google Earth to make it easy to create imaginative landscapes based on real-world locations, and now it’s already finding itself forced to backtrack.
Over on X, Google’s official news account has issued a statement:
Google hasn’t shared anything more specific about the policy violations it uncovered, nor what exactly it intends for these stronger guardrails to block. The company changing its mind about features is hardly unheard of for Google, but the extremely compressed timetable we’re looking at here is definitely a little out of the ordinary.
Admittedly, while both Google Earth and Google Maps tap into geospatial data, Earth has much more of a reputation as a professional tool, and we can appreciate how suddenly introducing a feature to generate fantastical images feels more than a little off-brand.
If you had the chance to give Nano Banana in Google Earth a spin during its brief existence, let us know what you thought of your experience down in the comments. Hopefully the rest of us will have a chance to try it for ourselves soon.
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