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There seem to be very few adults in the room at Google as of the past few years. This also happened with Bard's (remember when they thought Bard was a good name?) racist image generator. Does nobody do QA, UAT, or UX testing anymore?
I got Bard to execute a fork bomb, I think, when it was first launched. I noticed that it was evaluating the flow of a shell script incorrectly and it allowed execution, then refused to respond for 20 or 30 minutes.

Now, for some users, sharing a YouTube link adds some sort of tracking which then asks people who open the link to be "friends" with the person who shared it. Who thinks that this is a good idea, and why isn't it opt-in?

It's hard to take Google seriously these days.

Always delete the si= or is= parameter from a shared YouTube link. This will work until they copy Reddit's idea of encoding both the video ID and sharing indicator together as one big opaque encrypted string.
Do you get promoted for not launching a product? The interests of the individual and the institution do not always perfectly align.
The reverse of this is also bad. Numerous arduous processes that exist mostly because the people who ship nothing far outnumber those who do. I imagine striking a perfect balance is difficult.
The issue here is probably because you need to show how your work relates to AI to get promoted
People who want to destroy you at work (which I imagine is rampant at Google) will sometimes prevent you from doing something, but they might also encourage you to do it in such a way that you fail spectacularly.

Some of my favorites from my career:

1. PM enticing me to "volunteer" to build a PoC over the weekend, to have it ready by Monday morning – come Monday, PoC is shipped live to all international customers. It was nowhere near prod ready, it was just to demo 1 thing.

Naturally, endless tickets open asking about missing functionality, and changes to the dashboard, "Nothing works!".

I'm in Slack talking to customer support like "Sorry I don't know why they launched it, it's not even close to being done". I've had nightmares about this kinda thing before, and then it happened lol. Anyway it was easy to paint the image that I'm just trash, biting off more than I can chew, can't let me near anything, and I got fired for it. They want back to maintenance mode.

It was a simple dashboard that looked great (for investors) and solved problems for customers, but there was no way the other guys on the team were going to let me launch that thing. Rather than stop it, they just "helped" get it out early. Project dead, they never built that.

2. And on the other end where I was stopped from launching something, I've had 2 devs go in league to say that code I was writing was a huge security risk (front-end React) and kept saying in meetings "Yeah I saw some things" without pointing out exactly what.

At some point one of them just irreversibly deletes all the branches related to it, live in standup, and puffs his chest "Yeah sorry guys we're not releasing this stuff, I'm worried about code quality" basically got him promoted to CTO.

So yeah I imagine politics and mind games happen all the time at Google, and it's probably very confusing what is or is not a good idea, what will work and will not work, because of the massive distraction of everyone backstabbing and preparing to backstab.

It's a pattern much wider than Google or event technology sector. It's very apparent in AI craze trough society, public governance sector, journalism etc. For people like me (growing up in seventies) it seems that there is teenagers everywhere and nobody is responsible for anything any more.
Google has always been a technology company, never a product company. It’s very deep in their DNA.
Google’s culture seems so different from Apple’s which sometimes comes across as overly mature… which I personally prefer though!
Steve Job's mantra was that what you say No to is even more important than what you say Yes to.

Arguably dragging their heels on Apple Intelligence was an inadvertent form of this. Or years of working on a car but never releasing it. Or the other various rumored long-running prototypes/projects that never see the light of day.

There is someone with taste with authority to say no before slop is pushed onto the market, at least more often than their competitors. It's gotten worse over the years, but that reflex is still there on a relative basis.

what’s wrong with the name Bard?
I imagine because Bards never let the truth get in the way of a good story?
It's frustrating when a product has a generic name that returns pages of unrelated search results. It's also frustrating when the name gives no real hint about what it does.
Making bad mistakes is childish? Or correcting them?
What red flags would the name "Bard" have raised for you if you were on that team?
They are good products, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing them
Google is no longer a technology company, it’s a vehicle for engineers to acquire wealth via promotions
Didn't the saying go something like "go fast, break law" ?
Here is the original blog post, in case anyone is curious about the 'good path' https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/earth/na...

> Ex: Help students visualize the past instead of just reading about it. Teachers can show their classroom a historic site and type, “Render a hyper-realistic view of what these Pompeii ruins looked like in 78 A.D.” The modern-day ruins will instantly transform into a bustling, colorful street scene from the Roman Empire.

There are a metric boatload of these visualizations created to accompany history texts etc.

AI for image generation is great but I’m struggling to figure out why you would ever use this if it’s confined to satellite imagery.

This is all so fucking stupid.
What did that even do. Generate imaginary buildings and structures?

I am almost sure this was something for a performance or promotion: “Used AI effectively to…”

Some examples in the Ars Technica article include "refugees near the Mexican border", "a giant golden statue of President Donald Trump looming over the White House", and "a hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza". https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/google-earth-releases-swi...
Any boast about AI accelerating the development lifecycle comes with an equal or greater stock that examples like this become more frequent when there are less opportunities for someone to interrupt them with a smidge of common sense.
Product managers at Google have a strangehold on their bad releases. It's become a whole thing for engineers to have to please their XFN (cross functional) partners in product and UX for review cycles and promos.
I think if Google stopped retreating so quickly with its tail between its legs after getting “embarrassed”, people would stop caring. All of the “sins” that were created via this is nothing that other AI couldn’t produce either.

Part of the sport in making Google look bad is because they know Google will predictably cower when they are embarrassed. If they just said “ya, sometimes people will make bad pics but who cares?” people would stop caring.

Everything that Ars Technica found in my opinion is nothing that other AI image generators couldn’t do on their own. What’s the big deal?

I honestly don't know what the hell Google was thinking. I know shoving AI into everything is the rage these days, but this is simply an even more insane way to demolish the credibility of your own product than the AI overviews in Google Search.

Glad they came to their senses quickly.

I like the AI overviews.
I liked the feature (once I figured out how to access it, so confusing). But it only let you generate 1 image per day. So kind of useless.
Good, it was a piece of bad software not to call other things. Who though it was a good idea?
They'll shove AI everywhere, whether it makes sense or not doesn't matter. Sundar said "AI" needs to be everywhere, so they hope integrating AI into X will get them promoted. And unfortunately, this might even work..
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127573
This is predictable... they built a misinformation engine capable of generating things like falsified drone strikes, terrorist attacks, industrial accidents, and threatening images. Seems like no one paused and thought "what would the malicious internet do with this?"
But we can already generate these images via image editing models, so what's new here?
i’m struggling to think of a reason to use this other than shitposting
invalidate all remote sensing imagery from this day forward?
They have tokens to spend and managers are mentally ill and want AI in everything
any new data is good data

- all the AI corps

What even was this
30 Jul 2026 15:15:01 UTC

Google Rolls Out Nano Banana AI in Earth

https://digg.com/tech/rtkdxzb1

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49111228

[ok]

31 Jul 2026 16:06:51 UTC

Google Earth's New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Satellite Images

https://www.404media.co/google-earths-new-ai-lets-anyone-fab...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49124898

[ok]

31 Jul 2026 18:32:08 UTC

The problem with putting an AI image generator in Google Earth

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/973764/g...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49126938

[ok]

31 Jul 2026 20:04:03 UTC

Google withdraws new Earth AI tool after warnings over misinformation risks

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9349yx2ydvo

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127949

[ok]

31 Jul 2026 20:43:11 UTC

Google Earth risked ruin with retracted AI tool for making fake satellite pics

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/google-earth-releases-swi...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49128310

[ok]

I’d suggest anyone knee deep in AI reads the comments on this one. Then remember that they’re your market and customers.

It has got to the point it’s poison outside the niche tech bubble.

Well now I want to see the images that got this taken down.