{"id":1316,"date":"2026-08-06T12:10:39","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T12:10:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/08\/06\/adding-an-ai-tool-to-google-earth-shook-our-trust-in-maps-that-has-been-centuries-in-the-making\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T12:10:39","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T12:10:39","slug":"adding-an-ai-tool-to-google-earth-shook-our-trust-in-maps-that-has-been-centuries-in-the-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/08\/06\/adding-an-ai-tool-to-google-earth-shook-our-trust-in-maps-that-has-been-centuries-in-the-making\/","title":{"rendered":"Adding an AI tool to Google Earth shook our trust in maps that has been centuries in the making"},"content":{"rendered":"
An 1818 map of western Africa shows the continent bisected by the mythical ‘Mountains of Kong’, based on the explorations of Mungo Park.<\/span> Image: John Pinkerton’s A Modern Atlas via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Europe\u2019s cartographers traded on their reputation for accuracy and detail at a time of huge societal change. But as demand grew for increasingly detailed maps<\/a> of the world to support industrialisation<\/a> at home and colonisation<\/a> overseas, they didn\u2019t always get it right.<\/p>\n

For over a century, the Mountains of Kong<\/a> festooned maps of Africa after the Scottish surgeon and explorer Mungo Park<\/a> returned from an expedition in the 1790s and described them to his cartographer, James Rennell, as a possible source for the Niger river.<\/p>\n

Rennell, who is buried in Westminster Abbey<\/a>, dutifully produced two maps featuring this supposed mountain chain, extending it well beyond Park\u2019s journey into areas he could never have seen. His maps were widely copied, and doubts only grew about the mountain range\u2019s existence towards the end of the 19th century.<\/p>\n

In 1887-88, a French military officer, Louis-Gustave Binger, undertook an expedition to the area and proved it didn\u2019t exist<\/a>. Yet, in my work as a professor of cartography<\/a>, I was amazed to stumble upon a reference to \u201cKong Mountains, French W. Africa\u201d in the index of the 1936 edition of The Oxford Advanced Atlas<\/a> \u2013 almost 50 years after Binger\u2019s expedition.<\/p>\n

This underlines the lasting impact that maps have on how we see and understand the world. Mapmakers even enabled important early case law<\/a> for the copyright protections that are being tested by AI today.<\/p>\n

In 1785, London map publisher Robert Sayer sued his local rival<\/a> John Hamilton Moore for copying his nautical charts \u2013 but the court ruled in favour of Moore. It found that earlier charts could be consulted and improved, provided the new work was not simply a \u201cservile imitation\u201d but an improvement on what came before.<\/p>\n

This ruling has been cited as a defence of AI<\/a>, which consumes huge quantities of copyrighted material, but which reconstitutes it in ways that don\u2019t appear as direct imitations.<\/p>\n

A breakdown of trust<\/h2>\n

There has always been a huge amount of trust placed in the technology used to make our maps, from the ancient Greek dioptra<\/a> (a surveying instrument) to modern satellites. But that trust was brought into question recently when Google added generative AI to its Google Earth satellite image platform<\/a>, making it possible to create convincing but fictional satellite images.<\/p>\n

Rather than take Google\u2019s suggestions to render historic buildings or a \u201clakeside dream home\u201d, some users were quick to make and share worrying images<\/a> including bombed suburbs, collapsed landmarks and burning oil refineries<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The outcry was vociferous<\/a> \u2013 including from fact checkers such as BBC Verify<\/a>. Within 24 hours, Google rolled back the tool<\/a>, Nano Banana 2, and promised \u201cstronger guardrails\u201d in the future.<\/p>\n

\n \"Google<\/a>
\n Google Earth meets generative AI, briefly.<\/span>
\n Google<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The controversy is, in part, a tribute to the deep level of confidence Google Earth has earned from its user base \u2013 among them, fact checkers, journalists and the open-source intelligence community<\/a> who depend on Google\u2019s satellite mapping tool to verify life-threatening events in near-real time, from floods to famines.<\/p>\n

Satellite imagery is now a key part of the visual vocabulary of our 24-hour news cycle. Countless times each day, we consult a map on our phones or scroll past satellite imagery in a news feed. These images have become so commonplace because they can track wildfires, reveal the destruction of Gaza, or document US military action in Iran. They offer a god\u2019s eye view of Earth.<\/p>\n

\u2018A mirror of the real world\u2019<\/h2>\n

Journalists must act fast to verify and publish, which is why embedding generative AI within Google Earth was such a problem. Google stressed there would be an automatic AI watermark<\/a> with every image generated \u2013 but this could be cropped out before sharing.<\/p>\n

The process was also subtly different from requesting an entire image be created from scratch. In my test for this article, prompting ChatGPT to \u201cgenerate a photorealistic satellite image of central London following a severe flood\u201d appeared to return a plausible image.<\/p>\n

Looking more closely, however, I could see that some buildings were misshapen and major roads were wonky. Verification against Google Earth (what else?) easily flagged these issues, so the image could safely be ignored and labelled a fake.<\/p>\n

By uniting Google Earth with Nano Banana 2, genuine satellite images were being edited. If you wanted to collapse the Eiffel Tower, the points of reference around the disaster would still have aligned with the accredited source imagery. No oddities and errors would be found across the full image, thus providing much less for the fact checkers to go on when validating their sources.<\/p>\n

\n \"BBC<\/a>
\n <\/span>
\n BBC Verify\/Google Earth<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This validation process was used by the independent investigative journalism organisation Bellingcat<\/a> to show that the Russian government had faked satellite imagery<\/a> which suggested Malaysia Airlines MH17 had, in fact, been shot down by a Ukrainian fighter jet in July 2014. The headline of the Bellingcat article explaining its approach<\/a> asked: \u201cWho to trust, Google or the Russian MoD?\u201d<\/p>\n

Until the recent Google Earth AI furore<\/a>, the answer to that question was in little doubt. As Google\u2019s former geospatial technologist wrote<\/a>: \u201cWe used to describe Google Earth and Maps as a mirror of the real world \u2026 That absolute bedrock of trust was structurally shattered this week.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our trust in maps has been built up over centuries. Trust in Google Earth has taken just two decades (it was originally launched as EarthViewer3D<\/a> on June 11 2001 by a US tech startup that Google bought three years later). After countless pioneering refinements since the tool\u2019s relaunch<\/a> on June 28 2005, Google risked flooding the internet with more AI slop and fake images that run counter to what makes Google Earth, and maps in general, so valuable.<\/p>\n

But Google\u2019s rapid climbdown offers a welcome reminder about the values that have been at the heart of mapmaking throughout history. In the clamour to insert AI technology in every aspect of our lives, even the most evangelical tech companies still value trust above everything else.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

James Cheshire receives funding from UKRI. <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An 1818 map of western Africa shows the continent bisected by the mythical ‘Mountains of Kong’, based on the explorations of Mungo Park. Image: John Pinkerton’s A Modern Atlas via Wikimedia Commons Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Europe\u2019s cartographers traded on their reputation for accuracy and detail at a time of huge societal change. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}