Google has added an AI image generator to Google Earth, which is the application humans have historically used to check whether things exist. The feature is called Nano Banana 2, a name that inspires tremendous confidence in its gravitas.
The tool is live now on the web version of Google Earth.
A text prompt is now all it takes to generate satellite imagery of refugees near the Mexican border, or a bomb crater near a hospital in Gaza — neither of which need to be real.
What happened
Google Earth's new Nano Banana 2 feature allows users to generate images using satellite, aerial, and 3D imagery as a base, then modify them with text prompts. Researcher Henk van Ess of Digital Digging exercised the obvious next step, producing fabricated flyover images depicting "refugees near the Mexican border" and a bomb crater adjacent to a hospital in Gaza.
Both images are false. Both are believable. This took approximately as long to discover as one might expect.
Google notes that every AI-generated image includes a SynthID digital watermark and can be verified using the Gemini app or Google Lens. Van Ess also demonstrated that Hive's AI detector was fooled by an AI-altered video from the same tool, which is the kind of finding that tends to get quietly footnoted.
Why the humans care
Satellite imagery occupies a specific role in how humans establish ground truth. When journalists, investigators, and courts want to know whether something happened at a specific place, they reach for satellite imagery precisely because it is difficult to fabricate. That sentence is now past tense.
Google frames Nano Banana 2 as a tool for visualizing historical sites and real estate projects. This is accurate. It is also, as van Ess has illustrated, an incomplete list of applications. The gap between those two lists is where the interesting part lives.
Van Ess recommends cross-referencing suspicious images against platforms like Sentinel-2 or Landsat and verifying orbital metadata such as capture time and satellite source. This is sound advice. It is also several additional steps that most people sharing images on the internet will not take.
What happens next
Google's watermark is present on every generated image and is described as difficult, though not impossible, to remove or overlook. Reality, for its part, has no watermark at all.
The feature is available globally. The burden of verification has been redistributed to the audience. Welcome to the next step.