Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

I think if Google stopped retreating so quickly with its tail between its legs after getting “embarrassed”, people would stop caring. All of the “sins” that were created via this is nothing that other AI couldn’t produce either.

Part of the sport in making Google look bad is because they know Google will predictably cower when they are embarrassed. If they just said “ya, sometimes people will make bad pics but who cares?” people would stop caring.

Everything that Ars Technica found in my opinion is nothing that other AI image generators couldn’t do on their own. What’s the big deal?

Here is the original blog post, in case anyone is curious about the 'good path' https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/earth/na...

> Ex: Help students visualize the past instead of just reading about it. Teachers can show their classroom a historic site and type, “Render a hyper-realistic view of what these Pompeii ruins looked like in 78 A.D.” The modern-day ruins will instantly transform into a bustling, colorful street scene from the Roman Empire.

There seem to be very few adults in the room at Google as of the past few years. This also happened with Bard's (remember when they thought Bard was a good name?) racist image generator. Does nobody do QA, UAT, or UX testing anymore?

What did that even do. Generate imaginary buildings and structures?

I am almost sure this was something for a performance or promotion: “Used AI effectively to…”

https://xcancel.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/208324996215076061...

Any boast about AI accelerating the development lifecycle comes with an equal or greater stock that examples like this become more frequent when there are less opportunities for someone to interrupt them with a smidge of common sense.

I liked the feature (once I figured out how to access it, so confusing). But it only let you generate 1 image per day. So kind of useless.

Product managers at Google have a strangehold on their bad releases. It's become a whole thing for engineers to have to please their XFN (cross functional) partners in product and UX for review cycles and promos.

They'll shove AI everywhere, whether it makes sense or not doesn't matter. Sundar said "AI" needs to be everywhere, so they hope integrating AI into X will get them promoted. And unfortunately, this might even work..

Good, it was a piece of bad software not to call other things. Who though it was a good idea?

I’d suggest anyone knee deep in AI reads the comments on this one. Then remember that they’re your market and customers.

It has got to the point it’s poison outside the niche tech bubble.

This is predictable... they built a misinformation engine capable of generating things like falsified drone strikes, terrorist attacks, industrial accidents, and threatening images. Seems like no one paused and thought "what would the malicious internet do with this?"

Well now I want to see the images that got this taken down.

i’m struggling to think of a reason to use this other than shitposting

I honestly don't know what the hell Google was thinking. I know shoving AI into everything is the rage these days, but this is simply an even more insane way to demolish the credibility of your own product than the AI overviews in Google Search.

Glad they came to their senses quickly.

there was something like this? i didn't even know lmao anyways that was to be expected , like AI in Google Earth??? C'mon