While the company intended the feature to support creative projects, reporters at NPR were able to quickly generate realistic deepfakes—highly convincing AI-altered media—of a flooded U.S.
Capitol and fires at a strategic Iranian oil terminal.
The release has sparked significant alarm among human rights advocates and open-source investigators who rely on satellite imagery as a "safe bet" for verifying international events.
Experts from groups like Bellingcat informed NPR that because satellite photos are historically difficult to fake, they serve as essential evidence for documenting war crimes or debunking misinformation.
Analysts argue that by streamlining the creation of fake aerial data, Google is providing a mechanism that could be used by governments to dismiss real evidence of atrocities as computer-generated "slop." In response to these concerns, Google stated on social media that it has implemented safeguards to block harmful topics and uses SynthID—a digital watermarking technology—to label the images as AI-generated.
This metadata is designed to be detected by other Google tools like the Gemini AI assistant.
However, researchers noted that these protections do not prevent the initial spread of confusion on social media, where edited or fake satellite images often circulate faster than official corrections.