Google Earth slams the brakes on Gemini image generation for depressingly predictable reasons

TL;DR Yesterday, Google announce that Google Earth was getting Nano Banana 2 image generation. The company is now pressing pause on the feature, citing policy violations. Google plans to bring it back after stricter guardrails are in place.

Playing around generating images with AI is a whole lot of fun… up until it isn’t. At some point, someone’s going to make a particularly controversial image, or maybe try to pass off a fake as the real thing, or even just rip off a real artist’s work. Yesterday, Google announced it was bringing Gemini’s Nano Banana 2 image generation to Google Earth to make it easy to create imaginative landscapes based on real-world locations, and now it’s already finding itself forced to backtrack.