AI, misinformation, and the future of cybersecurity.

Maria Varmazis: Welcome, I'm Maria Varmazis, and you're listening to T-Minus, space cyber briefing. In this show, we examine the evolution of cybersecurity and the global and orbital infrastructure that powers, protects, and connects our lives. [ Music ] Hello, and welcome everyone. It is always a joy to have a group chat with two of my favorite people, and they would be Brandon Carp, leader of International Public-Private Partnerships at NTT, and my N2K colleague and host of the CyberWire Daily, Dave Bittner. For our session today, we decided to take a closer look at the Google Earth Nano Banana debacle from late July. No worries if you do not know what I'm talking about. In fact, we'll dive in first with Dave asking me to put my explaining cap on before we break it all down. Here we go.

Dave Bittner: So, Maria, I'm going to ask you to do the introduction here on our topic. There was some brief fun in the world of Google Maps recently [Maria laughs], what happened?

Maria Varmazis: Oh goodness, was this fun [Dave laughs]. So, on July 30, to much fanfare across the entire internet, Google Earth announced that you could generate with AI, Nano Banana 2 specifically, basically anything you wanted to do to a real-life place in Google Earth, you could-if you could imagine it, you could do it. And the pitch from Google for this was amazing. They rolled out a fancy blog post for it and everything, and they had five justifications for why [Dave laughs]-

Dave Bittner: God!

Maria Varmazis: Putting AI and image generation into Google Earth was a great idea.

Dave Bittner: Yeah-

Brandon Carp: Because nothing says geospatial intelligence like generative AI images [laughter].

Maria Varmazis: Right! For the entire public's unfettered use [laughter] so yeah. Reason number one was that you could bring history to life, so if you ever wanted to imagine what Pompeii looked like pre-you know [laughter].

Brandon Carp: While Vesuvius was exploding-

Maria Varmazis: You could-you could just do that and-

Dave Bittner: Watch people running in horror for their lives.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah, and you can then walk through Pompeii, you know, as it was potentially.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Maria Varmazis: And number two was learn more while you explore, so you could create custom infographics about a place without leaving Google Earth.

Brandon Carp: Ah, yes. That is certainly what everyone is doing.

Maria Varmazis: Oh yeah, definitely. Pitch number three was you could create professional real estate plans. So you know, here's a blank spot of ground. Generate what your strip mall would look like in real-time, I guess [laughing].

Dave Bittner: Alright.

Brandon Carp: That one makes sense.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah, it kind of makes sense. Reason number four sort of seems like reason number three, I guess they just needed to get to an odd number, so they padded it a little bit, was visualize projects before breaking ground. That sounds a little similar to every thing--

Dave Bittner: Yeah, same thing. Yeah.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah. And then number five [laughs], give your favorite place a makeover.

Dave Bittner: Oh--

Brandon Carp: Ah, perfect.

Maria Varmazis: [Laughing] And boy did people do just that [laughter], and the entire earth observation community cried out in unison, and then fell silent [laughter], it was quite amazing seeing everyone's--

Brandon Carp: It's like everyone's voices suddenly cried out [laughter]-

Maria Varmazis: It's quite amazing.

Dave Bittner: There was a brief period of time that this was up, and we'll get to that fact in a minute, but my favorite, I think, that I saw was Japan being attacked. Tokyo specifically being attacked by Godzilla, now Brandon, you were recently in Tokyo.

Brandon Carp: In fact, I was in Tokyo on that day-

Maria Varmazis: On that day!

Dave Bittner: [Laughing] As our man on the ground, can you confirm to us that this was AI and Tokyo did not in fact fall victim once again to Godzilla?

Brandon Carp: You know, the fine people of Tokyo, whom I work closely with in my job at NTT, they do love Godzilla, and there are numerous Godzilla statues [laughter] all over that city.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Brandon Carp: No, I looked, I tried to find this Google Earth life-sized Godzilla, and I couldn't find it in person, so it must not have been true.

Maria Varmazis: That's a shame, yeah, shameful [laughs].

Dave Bittner: Maria, the fun didn't last long.

Maria Varmazis: No, it did not, the-so again, earth observation folks, really did not like this, and it wasn't just cynically because it could potentially take away money from them, it's because this is going to create a nightmare, which I'm sure we'll get into. This feature from Google Earth lasted I think less than a day. Pretty much right after the launch, I think several hours later Google Earth actually pulled it, then they updated the blog post where they announced this feature, but the next day on the 31st of July saying we know that people uniquely trust Google Earth for a reliable view of the world. We've seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however, we've also seen people sharing screen shots of generated imagery that appeared to violate our policies. So, we're rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guard rails. It's important to note that generated images didn't appear in the main Google Earth experience for others to see, and were watermarked as AI generated.

Dave Bittner: Oh, okay.

Maria Varmazis: So I'm sure that would have stopped any shenanigans.

Dave Bittner: This message brought to you by Google's legal team [laughter]!

Maria Varmazis: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Brandon Carp: Yeah, so I mean, this whole thing it's very funny and I love the internet and it's delightful when the internet reminds you why it was invented, and the sharing of memes and cat videos and Godzilla attacking Tokyo through Google Earth. But it kind of brings up this point that we're still talking about across multiple industries, which is what are the legitimate useful applications of AI in all of these industries, and you know, I think the space industry in particular has been struggling with this one quite a bit and hasn't really figured out the useful applications of some of these technologies, and so experimenting is good, experimenting is useful, but I think that there's a lot to still be figured out by people in the industry.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah...

Brandon Carp: Yeah, I'm not sure what the right application is for earth observation, but generating fake images certainly isn't it.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah, I just-what could possibly go wrong is just the question that everybody should ask with this sort of thing, and I'm amazed that this made it to print, so to speak, I just--

Dave Bittner: Does this set a new record for a Google project being removed? I mean, Google sort of famously deletes things that people have found useful, but I don't think it has ever happened this quickly.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah, within 24 hours.

Brandon Carp: It kind of reminds me of that Microsoft chat bot that they put on Twitter, you know, a decade ago-

Dave Bittner: Oh! Tay! Yes!

Brandon Carp: Yeah, Tay, became instantly racist!

Maria Varmazis: Oh my god forgot about that, oh yeah.

Dave Bittner: My take on Tay was that Tay reflected who we actually are, and not who we aspire to be, and that was Tay's downfall [laughing].

Brandon Carp: Here we are at least on the internet-

Maria Varmazis: That's true--

Dave Bittner: Sum total of all the good and bad, of all Earth's people.

Brandon Carp: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: So at the risk of taking this more seriously than perhaps it deserves to be taken, what are the takeaway lessons here when it comes to shall I say slapping AI on everything that moves?

Brandon Carp: Well, I think in a certain extent, some of these companies have to slap AI on everything that moves, to justify the capital expenditures, and to experiment in such a way to find the useful application, so like AI-it's striking a difficult balance, and this is kind of the security angle as well, is these industries are investing so much-capital and human resources, and time, that they need to see where this can apply and be useful, like that one use case that you brought up Maria in the beginning of, okay, let's test out some, you know, large construction projects, and see what it would look like, and how it would affect other regions, and the shadows it would cast, or how it would affect traffic flow and things like that. All of that sounds like a fantastic use of AI.

Maria Varmazis: Yes, it does [laughs]!

Brandon Carp: You know, connected to some, you know, legitimate applications and products, but the way to make that useful is putting guardrails around it, and actually can kind of deliberately, kind of making the use case as specific as possible. I think the problem here was it was as broad as possible. There were no guardrails. It was a general addition of image generation to this tool that is kind of like, doesn't have a specific use case, it has whatever, it's a creative system. It's, you know, people can do whatever they want with it. And some of those use cases will be helpful, like real estate projects, and others will be silly, like, you know, Kaju's attacking cities [laughter], and some of them will be downright disturbing, like, potentially images of air strikes in Warsaw, or something like that.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah, yeah, which a lot of those images were just made for demonstration purposes, like this is how easy it is to show disinformation, and just-I saw it everywhere on social media going, this is real easy, to fabricate an entire story now with a convincing Google Earth image.

Brandon Carp: Yeah.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah, I mean, the use case of, again, a real estate project or something like that, I mean, that's been around for a little while. But privately. Just the idea of making this publicly available. I mean, it's sort of one of those-I struggle with it, because yeah, information wants to be free, why shouldn't everyone get to play around with this kind of thing? But maybe we shouldn't [laughing], I don't know. I struggle with it. But the disinformation potential for this was so obvious, I'm just amazed, and the idea of we put a watermark on it, that has not stopped anyone from believing all these images are out there, and they're easy to remove anyway, to be honest. [ Music ] Please, and ask me how I know how easily one can remove those watermarks, I really don't want to get in trouble. We'll be right back! [ Music ] Let's get back to my conversation now, with Brandon Carp and Dave Bittner about the Google Earth AI image generation, shall we say misstep? Dave will start us off.

Dave Bittner: I guess for me, the-and this is part of a bigger concern I have with AI in general, is just the potential for the erosion of ground truth.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah. Yes. Absolutely.

Dave Bittner: Google Earth is one of the pillars on which we build ground truth understanding of our world, and so to add a tool that makes it easy to manipulate seems problematic to me.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah, to completely undermine its trustworthiness, why would you want to tank your brand that way? That's a whole marketing discussion [laughter], but I just don't understand it, just completely, yeah, I mean, in terms of in the space context, Brandon, going back to a much earlier point you made about applications for AI, the one that I'm really excited about is for autonomy, for spacecraft, where you know, they're really far away. That makes a lot of sense to me.

Dave Bittner: Sure.

Maria Varmazis: I mean, we're not there yet [laughs], we're-we're just [overlapping speaker].

Brandon Carp: Like starfish space, you know, autonomously doing rendezvous in orbit, right? So like those control systems are running, and some of that is, I imagine, reinforcement learning or some sort of what we would consider to be artificial intelligence, right?

Maria Varmazis: Yep!

Brandon Carp: Some sort of algorithmic type of intelligence. And so yeah, to your point, like there are some really cool use cases. And then in terms of Earth observation and applications on the ground, and how we make use of that data, or process data in situ in space, before sending it down. Like, there is a lot of really interesting, but again very niche, extraordinarily niche-

Maria Varmazis: Sure is!

Brandon Carp: Applications of this stuff. And to Dave's point, when you lose that kind of small community of interest where, you know, the major players know each other, they talk, they share information, they share applications, they share use cases and ideas, right, that's the foundation of trust. And the moment you kind of expand an idea and create a generalized concept or a generalized tool, you lose that community of interest, and therefore kind of that root of trust, and that seems to be what we're struggling with across industries right now, especially across the internet and artificial intelligence systems, and kind of what is the root of trust? And at the end of the day, it's based on relationships, and it's very hard to have a relationship, you know, across massive communities of people.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah, I have to wonder if Maxer had Google Earth on speed dial, and just the moment this was announced, they said, "Bro!" [laughing] you cannot do this [laughter], I just have to wonder that industry pressure at play [laughter]. I mean it's just going to cast out in everything, right?

Brandon Carp: And talk about-like another-yeah, exactly and like another implication of that, I just saw, I wish I remember where I saw it, but just in the last couple of days, this fascinating demonstration how Google Earth images are being updated in Ukraine. And so you're having now older, you know, pre-war Ukraine images stitched right next to post-war images. And so these towns look like they're like half destroyed with a very hard transition lines, because some of the images were taken five years ago and some of them were taken in the last couple of years, and so you're seeing in real-time what's actually, you know, the before and after, which I think is really useful to see in a really interesting kind of secondary impact of these technologies. But then, to your point, right, if they implement a technology on top of Google Earth, it calls into question the veracity of those images, that doesn't help, you know, the norms of society within which I know we all want to live.

Maria Varmazis: That would be nice [laughs].

Dave Bittner: He said people just shrugging and saying oh, AI, is that the new fake news? You know, it just makes it easy to dismiss anything.

Brandon Carp: Yeah.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah, I think we're there. Yeah, I think we're already there. I mean, I'm already there with a lot of this stuff.

Dave Bittner: [Laughs] I will say-

Maria Varmazis: You know it's like one other domino falling, it just didn't feel good.

Dave Bittner: I once pranked my nephew by convincing him that Google Maps, the satellite views were real-time [laughter]. I had him-

Maria Varmazis: A lot of people think that though! A lot of people think that!

Dave Bittner: I had him run outside the house and wave [laughs], and he came back in, and I said "I totally saw you waving out there!"

Brandon Carp: [Laughter] So I'll leave you with a similar funny story. In college, there was this buddy of mine at the naval academy, and when we'd go out to bars in Washington D.C., we didn't necessarily want to say we were midshipmen at the naval academy, and so he came up with this great idea where he told people when he was meeting them, you know, typically other, you know, young women-that he was part of the Google Sky Team. And the Google Sky Team purpose was to skydive and take a camera with them, and videotape the skydive, and that's how you got the zoom on Google Maps and Google Earth [laughter]-

Maria Varmazis: Oh my god!

Brandon Carp: And the number of people who believed this is extraordinary [laughter].

Maria Varmazis: Honestly a couple of years in, I'd believe it. I'm not even going to lie [laughter], I would-if he sold it well? I'd be like completely on board. I want to believe that's true.

Brandon Carp: Sam, Sam, wherever you are, you sold it very well [laughter].

Dave Bittner: Oh my goodness, wow [laughter], alright! Well! Brandon Carp is leader of International Public Private Partnerships at NTT, Maria Varmazis is my CyberWire co-host, and host of the T-Minus Space Cyber Podcast. Thank you both for joining us!

Brandon Carp: Dave, Maria, good to see you all.

Maria Varmazis: Good to see you, Brandon. Good to see you Dave. [ Music ] And that's T-Minus Space Cyber Briefing, brought to you by N2K CyberWire. If you like what you heard today, you will also enjoy our newsletter, Signals in Space. You'll get research and notes pulled together by our producer, Ethan Cook, and me, along with this week's top space cyber news stories. Subscribe by visiting the CyberWire.com/newsletters. And as always, we would love to know what you think of our podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing cyber security landscape. If you like the show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes, or send an email to Space@n2k.com. We are proud that N2K CyberWire is part of the daily routine of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector. From the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. N2K helps cybersecurity professionals grow, learn and stay informed. As the nexus for discovery and connection, we bring you the people, the technology, and the ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how at N2K.com. Thank you for listening to T-Minus. I am your host, Maria Varmazis. And the show was produced by Ethan Cook and Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Pelsman, and Trey Hester, with original music by Elliot Pelsman. Our Executive Producer is Jennifer Eiben, with content strategy by Myong Klout [assumed spelling]. Peter Kilpe is our publisher. We'll see you next week.