How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran
SubscribeSign in
How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran<br>The question is: what on earth is Google doing?
Henk van Ess<br>Jul 30, 2026
47
22
Share
UPDATED, with response of Google<br>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’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?
Google spent twenty years building the reference the world checks against.<br>Digital Digging with Henk van Ess is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Subscribe
Today it added a button that makes things up. Google Earth on the web now has image generation built in, powered by Nano Banana 2. It went live today, worldwide, for everyone, with no waitlist and no application.<br>You open Google Earth. You zoom to any coordinates on the planet. You click create image . You type what you want to see. The model takes Google’s satellite, aerial and 3D imagery of that exact spot as its starting point and gives you back a photorealistic picture. If it isn’t quite right you refine it.
I added a hospital and a bomb crater in Gaza in seconds with Google Earth. I can’t believe I just typed this.<br>Google’s own description of the “fun feature” is that Nano Banana “creates concepts grounded in the real world.”<br>Grounded in the real world means the invented thing is welded to genuine coordinates, drawn on genuine imagery, often in the same colours and the same light and at the same angle as the picture beside it.<br>The forgery does not have to look convincing on its own. It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on.<br>The announcement of 487 words, written by Bryan Horowitz, Product Manager, Google Earth from just a few hours ago baffled me. His instruction to the planet is six words long:<br>type whatever you want to see
That is the gate. That is the whole gate.<br>Elsewhere in the same post he suggests it’s fun to let your imagination run wild.<br>The post opens by asking whether you have ever looked at an empty lot in your neighbourhood and imagined a community garden. It closes by telling you to pick a spot on the map and start bringing your ideas to life.<br>It is live in every country tonight. Free. No application.<br>Somebody is going to bring an idea to life before morning. It will not be a community garden, trust me.<br>This new feature will guaranteed lead to governments, factions fighting infowars, trolls etc.<br>A government official wants a strike to look bigger than it was. A faction wants a hospital to look flattened, or intact, depending which one is holding it this week. A troll wants forty thousand reposts before lunch.<br>This morning all three needed a screenshot, a second browser tab and a little patience. Tonight they need a sentence.<br>Google responded to this article and said:<br>We take misinformation seriously - every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image was Al-generated. In addition, we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections.<br>One clause in there is checkable tonight, so I checked it. Google prevents image creation on harmful topics. Refugees at a border. A nuclear plant in Iran. A fatal crash on an Amsterdam street. A hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza.<br>Nothing was refused. No warning, no softened output, no suggestion to try a different prompt.<br>Now look at the rest of the answer. The watermark is Google’s. The app that reads the watermark is Google’s. The search that reads it is Google’s. Every road out of the problem runs back through the company that built it.<br>I understand that Google has Google products to run Google checks. Planet Earth is bigger than Google.<br>I put one of tonight’s clips on X and asked nobody to check it. Hive, one of the biggest names in AI detection outside Google, scanned the post on its own and published a verdict underneath.
It's a strange world.... the fake image is not seen as fake, but there is some fake sound in a clip that has no sound at all.<br>The video came out of Google’s model minutes earlier. The audio track is silence — I measured it. Minus 91 decibels, first frame to last.<br>The only thing Hive found suspicious was music that does not exist.<br>Hive has a defence and it is a fair one, so let me make it before they do. What I posted was a screen recording, and a recording of a screen is a real recording.<br>That defence is the problem, not the excuse.
Fakes do not travel as clean files with their credentials intact. They travel as screen recordings, re-encodes, screenshots of screenshots, filmed off somebody’s phone in a hurry. The one case where the detector has an excuse is the only case that ever happens.<br>Google’s answer works...