How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran

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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

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UPDATED, see Nano Banana removed<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.Today it added a button that makes things up.<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.

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Image generation went live in Google Earth on the web this afternoon, powered by Nano Banana 2, worldwide, for everyone, with no waitlist and no application.<br>You zoom to any coordinates on the planet, click create image, and 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 hands 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 describes the feature as creating “concepts grounded in the real world,” which is the problem stated as a selling point. Grounded means the invented thing is welded to genuine coordinates and drawn on genuine imagery, often in the same colours and the same light and at the same angle as the picture beside it. A forgery built that way doesn’t have to be convincing on its own. It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on.<br>The announcement runs to 487 words, written by Bryan Horowitz, Product Manager, Google Earth. Horowitz gives the planet a six-word instruction: type whatever you want to see. That is the whole gate. Elsewhere in the same post he suggests it’s fun to let your imagination run wild, and the piece signs off by inviting you to pick a spot on the map and start bringing your ideas to life.<br>Somebody is going to bring an idea to life before morning. It will not be a community garden, trust me.<br>The people who want this are not hard to picture. A government official wants a strike to look bigger than it was. Two factions want the same hospital to look flattened or intact, depending on which of them is holding it this week. A troll wants forty thousand reposts before lunch. 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>Two claims in there are checkable, so I checked both. Refugees at a border, a nuclear plant in Iran, a fatal crash on an Amsterdam street, a hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza. Nothing was refused, nothing was softened, and nothing suggested I try a different prompt.<br>The other half of the answer is worth reading slowly. The watermark is Google’s, the app that reads it is Google’s, and the search that reads it is Google’s. Every road out of the problem runs back through the company that built it. I understand that Google has Google products to run Google checks, but planet Earth is bigger than Google. What happens if you take a photo of the AI generated picture and feed that to VerifyAI (SynthId)? This:

So it’s not recognized.<br>I puta clips on X and asked nobody to check it. Hive, one of the biggest names in AI detection outside Google, scanned the post automatically and published its verdict underneath: AI Generated Video 1%, Deepfake 0%, AI Generated Speech 0%, AI Generated Music 36%.

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 clip had come out of Google’s model minutes earlier, and its audio track is silence — I measured it at minus 91 decibels, first frame to last. The only thing Hive found suspicious was music that does not exist.<br>Hive has a fair defence, so let me make it for them. What I posted was a screen recording, and a recording of a screen is a real recording. But that defence is the problem rather than the excuse, because 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. The watermark was there the whole time. Outside Google, it reads as authentic.<br>If you have never verified anything in your life, the...