Adding an AI tool to Google Earth shook our trust in maps that has been centuries in the making - Stuff South Africa
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Europe’s cartographers traded on their reputation for accuracy and detail at a time of huge societal change. But as demand grew for increasingly detailedmapsof the. . .
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Europe’s cartographers traded on their reputation for accuracy and detail at a time of huge societal change. But as demand grew for increasingly detailedmapsof the world to supportindustrialisationat home andcolonisationoverseas, they didn’t always get it right. For over a century, theMountains of Kongfestooned maps of Africa after the Scottish surgeon and explorerMungo Parkreturned from an expedition in the 1790s and described them to his cartographer, James Rennell, as a possible source for the Niger river. Rennell,who is buried in Westminster Abbey, dutifully produced two maps featuring this supposed mountain chain, extending it well beyond Park’s journey into areas he could never have seen. His maps were widely copied, and doubts only grew about the mountain range’s existence towards the end of the 19th century. In 1887-88, a French military officer, Louis-Gustave Binger, undertook an expedition to the area andproved it didn’t exist. Yet,in my work as a professor of cartography, I was amazed to stumble upon a reference to “Kong Mountains, French W. Africa” in the index of the 1936 edition ofThe Oxford Advanced Atlas– almost 50 years after Binger’s expedition. This underlines the lasting impact that maps have on how we see and understand the world. Mapmakers even enabled importantearly case lawfor the copyright protections that are being tested by AI today. In 1785, London map publisher Robert Sayersued his local rivalJohn Hamilton Moore for copying his nautical charts – but the court ruled in favour of Moore. It found that earlier charts could be consulted and improved, provided the new work was not simply a “servile imitation” but an improvement on what came before. This ruling hasbeen cited as a defence of AI, which consumes huge quantities of copyrighted material, but which reconstitutes it in ways that don’t appear as direct imitations. A breakdown of trustThere has always been a huge amount of trust placed in the technology used to make our maps, from theancient Greek dioptra(a surveying instrument) to modern satellites. But that trust was brought into question recently when Google addedgenerative AI to its Google Earth satellite image platform, making it possible to create convincing but fictional satellite images. Rather than take Google’s suggestions to render historic buildings or a “lakeside dream home”, some users were quick tomake and share worrying imagesincluding bombed suburbs, collapsed landmarks andburning oil refineries. The outcry wasvociferous– including from fact-checkers such asBBC Verify. Within 24 hours,Google rolled back the tool, Nano Banana 2, and promised “stronger guardrails” in the future. Google Earth meets generative AI, briefly. GoogleThe controversy is, in part, a tribute to the deep level of confidence Google Earth has earned from its user base – among them, fact checkers, journalists and theopen-source intelligence communitywho depend on Google’s satellite mapping tool to verify life-threatening events in near-real time, from floods to famines. Satellite imagery is now a key part of the visual vocabulary of our 24-hour news cycle. Countless times each day, we consult a map on our phones or scroll past satellite imagery in a news feed. These images have become so commonplace because they can track wildfires, reveal the destruction of Gaza, or document US military action in Iran. They offer a god’s-eye view of Earth. ‘A mirror of the real world’Journalists must act fast to verify and publish, which is why embedding generative AI within Google Earth was such a problem. Google stressed there would be anautomatic AI watermarkwith every image generated – but this could be cropped out before sharing. The process was also subtly different from requesting an entire image be created from scratch. In my test for this article, prompting ChatGPT to “generate a photorealistic satellite image of central London following a severe flood” appeared to return a plausible image. Looking more closely, however, I could see that some buildings were misshapen and major roads were wonky. Verification against Google Earth (what else?) easily flagged these issues, so the image could safely be ignored and labelled a fake. By uniting Google Earth with Nano Banana 2, genuine satellite images were being edited. If you wanted to collapse the Eiffel Tower, the points of reference around the disaster would still have aligned with the accredited source imagery. No oddities and errors would be found across the full image, thus providing much less for the fact-checkers to go on when validating their sources. This validation process was used by the independent investigative journalism organisationBellingcatto show that the Russian government hadfaked satellite imagerywhich suggested Malaysia Airlines MH17 had, in fact, been shot down by a Ukrainian fighter jet in July 2014. The headline ofthe Bellingcat article explaining its approachasked: “Who to trust, Google or the Russian MoD?”Until the recentGoogle Earth AI furore, the answer to that question was in little doubt. As Google’s former geospatial technologistwrote: “We used to describe Google Earth and Maps as a mirror of the real world … That absolute bedrock of trust was structurally shattered this week. ”Our trust in maps has been built up over centuries. Trust in Google Earth has taken just two decades (it was originally launched asEarthViewer3Don June 11 2001 by a US tech startup that Google bought three years later). After countless pioneering refinements sincethe tool’s relaunchon June 28 2005, Google risked flooding the internet with more AI slop and fake images that run counter to what makes Google Earth, and maps in general, so valuable. But Google’s rapid climbdown offers a welcome reminder about the values that have been at the heart of mapmaking throughout history. In the clamour to insert AI technology in every aspect of our lives, even the most evangelical tech companies still value trust above everything else. James Cheshireis a Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography, Department of Geography, UCLThis article first appeared inThe ConversationAdd Stuff as your preferred source on Google