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- Hacker News
- "Trusted view of the world" but you could make bomb craters in Gaza. SynthID watermark doesn't fix that.by nc55g3g
- A man cannot have fun any more these days.
Is allowing a man to generate corn circles to send conspiracy theorists on a wild goose chase through the UK for the weekend really too much to ask for?
by Jamesbeam - Maybe LLMs will be the final nail in the coffin for putting every little ounce of every little article behind an annoying paywall.
A world model that ingests data in real-time from every flock camera, every iPhone, and every Rayban meta spy glasses won't have any need for journalists.
by iamleppert - Censorship is now being called `guardrails`.by snvzz
- I can't wait for nano banana on pathology images.by rossant
- When they talk about everybody losing their jobs, that doesn’t bother them one bit. In fact, they seem to be truly happy when they talk about that. But this, Oh No!by g42gregory
- > Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. What on earth is Google doing? Check my latest post here:
We're back to nerfing Google's products because "safety". Yes, you can obviously do this stuff, like you can obviously use Excel to open up a financial statement, change some numbers and tweet about it.
The obvious answer, and I believe it's already being utilized, is watermarks. There's been a lot of research in creating imperceptible, unremovable fingerprints from the generated image. Think very subtle statistical patterns in the generated pixels.
Instead we're going to get some long prompt about how not to do bad things that steps all over the user's intent.
by bko - Unless the watermark is a giant “This is fake” diagonally across the center of the image, everything will get shared virally in the 3 second attention span of doomscrolling without a second look.by mysterydip
- Related earlier:
Google Earth's New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Satellite Images
- Why does Google Earth need anything remotely related to AI image gen?by Ancalagon
- It doesn't. Whoever is above the Nano Banana 2 team at Google is pushing some agenda that forcibly integrates their AI slop image generator into other teams' products.by walrus01
- A Product Manager in some AI-adjacent department needs a promotion.by chedabob
- Is this the fastest Google has killed one of its own products (features)?by mimischi
- Even the Microsoft Kin lasted 48 days (I thought it had been cancelled on launch day, but digging back it was just the tech press saying "This was a mistake from Day One" which is certainly true, but not the same thing :-)by eichin
- They have announced a mobile app for AI Studio but now they removed it before it even launched so... ;) https://9to5google.com/2026/07/31/gemini-ai-studio-app/by sunaookami
- Does this move us closer to needing registries of authentic images? (White-listing? Only a partial solution.)
Google's response today, in addition to removing nano banana from Earth, was that people should just use Google's synthID(?) AI detection app, to determine if this is a blacklisted (effectively) image.
Of course that's impractical because a million people could quickly receive the image .. the image would make an impression on them before detection. And, this would also mean that Google's AI detection software needs to be ran by every human for every image that they view, in order to determine if it's valid. So, let's say that's 100 images, so that's a 100 to the millionth power? (Did I really get a CS degree?) I think it's just 100 million visits to Google synthID tool.. lol.
If we go with a white listing approach then we know that we should trust the image. If we go with a blacklisting approach then we only know that we should not trust the image, which we already knew before we ran the tool....
- https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-plant-a-nuclear-plan... original article is more interesting, also linked in above main article
by ncr100 - I've toyed with the idea of issuing LTE IMEI-like identity numbers for digital cameras (and a LTE IMSI/SIM-like identity number to identify a paying accountholder who wishes to subscribe to an image-creator attestation service).
Each photograph would attach cryptographically-verifiable metadata attesting to both the identity of the camera and the person who owns it. (Say, m="Camera 123 owned by subscriber 456 created a raw 20MP image with sha 0xdeadbeef... at time 2026-01-23 4:56pm" countersigned by both the device and subscriber keys).
Image compression would be an immediate issue. Key lifetime management would be another major issue, as would key revocation behavior. Device manufacturers would take time to buy in and phase in hardware support. Consumers would object to yet another subscription service. Privacy and freedom-of-the-press advocates would probably have something to say about establishing a norm where we doubt the legitimacy of any digital images that refuse to "out" their creator.
And other than those pesky little non-starters, I've yet to find anything wrong with it :'-)
(see also: Schneier's Law)
by xtajv - Watermarking is for fools. Those doing the generation and watermarking will control what is perceived as false or true. Watermarks have historically been about proof of ownership or origin. Watermarking fake creations works in reverse, all of a sudden what's void of watermarking is true, but those that control the watermarking can either add them to truths to turn them into fakes or skip watermarking for certain people or organizations, making their fake creations become truths.
- There are a lot of things reasonable people would use AI for. This is not one of them. This is a crazy idea. Just plain bonkers. No sense to be found. "Oh, you want to see what's at that location? How about we make something up for you?"by SwellJoe
- I didn't use the feature, so I don't know if it was capable of this, but the thing you describe sounds potentially useful for land developers or folks trying to conceptualize buildings/city-development.
the people who make those stupid renders of yet-to-be-built strip malls filled with people and live bands that they use to sell development plans to city commerce groups.
by serf - What I find interesting - and seems absolutely logic for such a large company - that it's fine for a group of people to work on something tha is clearly to fail from Day 1, and it just seems to be ok.
- Yeah this has “PM trying to put an AI release on their promo packet” written all over it.by paxys