Google Earth's AI image tool lasted one day 🌍

Good morning. Google Earth got AI image generation this week and pulled it a day later once people started faking disasters at real places. MiniMax put out a new video model that makes sharp 2K clips with actual stereo sound baked in, no separate audio step. And a real round raccoon named Jimothy has become the internet's favorite AI action hero, casting spells and winning boss raids he never actually did. Which of these actually made it into your feed this week? Hit reply and tell me. We cover all three below.

Google added an AI image generator right into Google Earth on July 30, running on its Nano Banana 2 model. Pick any real spot on the map, type a prompt, and it would reimagine that exact location, pitched as a tool for real estate and picturing how a place might change over time. One day later, Google pulled it.

People immediately used it to fake disasters at real, recognizable places: the Eiffel Tower collapsing, a sinkhole swallowing the Great Pyramid, tanks rolling into a real capital, a nuclear plant where none exists. What makes this land for you isn't the map, it's the model. Nano Banana 2 is the same image tech creators are already using inside Gemini and Flow, and it's now good enough that a convincing fake of any real place takes one sentence and zero skill. The barrier used to be whether you could make it look real. That barrier is gone.

The whole value of a "leaked" photo, a "caught on camera" moment, or a behind-the-scenes shot was that faking it convincingly took real work. Not anymore. The upside is you can generate a photoreal establishing shot of anywhere on earth without a plane ticket. The downside is your audience now assumes everything is fake by default, so the moment something reads as too clean or too perfect, they tune out. Realism stopped being the flex. Whether people believe you is the new one, and you earn that with how you show your work, not how good the render looks.

MiniMax launched H3, also called Hailuo 3.0, on July 31. The pitch is that it handles text, images, video, and audio all in one pass, so instead of making a silent clip and bolting sound on afterward, it generates the picture and the matching stereo audio together. Dialogue, effects, and background noise come out synced to the scene. It does up to 15 seconds at a sharp 2K, which is a real jump for a single generation.

The part that matters for your wallet: MiniMax says it runs at well under half the price of the big-name models for similar output, and it's aimed squarely at ads, product videos, and short social content, the exact stuff most creators are actually making, rather than chasing the highest possible resolution. That's the whole personality of this model, cheap and complete over max quality.

It's not the sharpest option out there. Kling and Veo still push full 4K, and H3 tops out at 2K. But raw resolution isn't the game for most of what you post. Sound that's actually tied to the video, decent control over the look, and a price that lets you generate fifty versions instead of five is worth more than pixels nobody counts on a phone screen. If you've been stitching audio onto silent AI clips by hand, this deletes a whole step.

A real raccoon in Seattle named Jimothy went viral a couple weeks back for looking like a furry bowling ball, thanks to a rare condition called short spine syndrome that gives him a stubby, neckless, almost cartoon shape. He's 100% real, filmed on people's phones and security cams around the Ballard neighborhood. He got so big the Mariners made him a mascot and there's a Google Easter egg for his name. Then the creators got hold of him.

Over the past week, people have been running the real Jimothy footage through generative models and dropping him into entire fantasy universes. Jimothy casting spells in a misty forest. Jimothy winning a boss raid in World of Warcraft. Jimothy as the main character in a cinematic trailer that doesn't exist. His actual shape is already so surreal that the AI versions land in this perfect spot where you can't fully tell where the real raccoon ends and the render begins, which is exactly why it works.

There's a real playbook in this for you. A weird, distinctive real subject is rocket fuel for AI remixing, because the character is already memorable before you touch it, and audiences love watching something real get pushed somewhere impossible. The creators winning this week didn't film anything. They took footage the internet was already obsessed with and gave it a second life the algorithm couldn't resist.