A US government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a state department presentation at a global conference in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attenders who took screenshots and posted them online.
Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the Aids 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the state department’s new health agreements.
A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
The state department said it took “full responsibility” for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who hastily changed the slide deck before the event.
The map showed Nigeria, where the US currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara desert. Mozambique, which is in south-eastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Côte d’Ivoire in west Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.
Screenshots of the map first appeared in a Substack post by the Aids expert Emily Bass and were widely shared on LinkedIn, with one post garnering about 40,000 views.
“Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work,” wrote Matt Petit, who focuses on AI and geopolitics at the Atlantic Council, in the post.
In a statement, the state department said: “We take full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners.” The speaker at the conference was Jeff Graham, the top US health envoy who oversees the initiative known as the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, or Pepfar. He did not reply to requests for comment.
The state department said the discussions at the conference were “substantive and constructive” despite the map and that it remained committed to fighting Aids with real results. The Trump administration’s decision last year to pause funding pending a review disrupted aid programs worldwide but Pepfar’s core work such as the provision of life-saving drugs has largely resumed. The US is scaling back other areas of its spending including on prevention and surveillance, and plans to fully phase out the program in South Africa.
UPDATED, with response of Google Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?
Google spent twenty years building the reference the world checks against.
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Today it added a button that makes things up. Google Earth on the web now has image generation built in, powered by Nano Banana 2. It went live today, worldwide, for everyone, with no waitlist and no application.
You open Google Earth. You zoom to any coordinates on the planet. You click create image. You type what you want to see. The model takes Google’s satellite, aerial and 3D imagery of that exact spot as its starting point and gives you back a photorealistic picture. If it isn’t quite right you refine it.
I added a hospital and a bomb crater in Gaza in seconds with Google Earth. I can’t believe I just typed this.
Google’s own description of the “fun feature” is that Nano Banana “creates concepts grounded in the real world.”
Grounded in the real world means the invented thing is welded to genuine coordinates, drawn on genuine imagery, often in the same colours and the same light and at the same angle as the picture beside it.
The forgery does not have to look convincing on its own. It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on.
The announcement of 487 words, written by Bryan Horowitz, Product Manager, Google Earth from just a few hours ago baffled me. His instruction to the planet is six words long:
type whatever you want to see
That is the gate. That is the whole gate.
Elsewhere in the same post he suggests it’s fun to let your imagination run wild.
The post opens by asking whether you have ever looked at an empty lot in your neighbourhood and imagined a community garden. It closes by telling you to pick a spot on the map and start bringing your ideas to life.
It is live in every country tonight. Free. No application.
Somebody is going to bring an idea to life before morning. It will not be a community garden, trust me.
This new feature will guaranteed lead to governments, factions fighting infowars, trolls etc.
A government official wants a strike to look bigger than it was. A faction wants a hospital to look flattened, or intact, depending which one is holding it this week. A troll wants forty thousand reposts before lunch.
This morning all three needed a screenshot, a second browser tab and a little patience. Tonight they need a sentence.
We take misinformation seriously - every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image was Al-generated. In addition, we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections.
One clause in there is checkable tonight, so I checked it. Google prevents image creation on harmful topics. Refugees at a border. A nuclear plant in Iran. A fatal crash on an Amsterdam street. A hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza.
Nothing was refused. No warning, no softened output, no suggestion to try a different prompt.
Now look at the rest of the answer. The watermark is Google’s. The app that reads the watermark is Google’s. The search that reads it is Google’s. Every road out of the problem runs back through the company that built it.
I understand that Google has Google products to run Google checks. Planet Earth is bigger than Google.
I put one of tonight’s clips on X and asked nobody to check it. Hive, one of the biggest names in AI detection outside Google, scanned the post on its own and published a verdict underneath.
It's a strange world.... the fake image is not seen as fake, but there is some fake sound in a clip that has no sound at all.
The video came out of Google’s model minutes earlier. The audio track is silence — I measured it. Minus 91 decibels, first frame to last.
The only thing Hive found suspicious was music that does not exist.
Hive has a defence and it is a fair one, so let me make it before they do. What I posted was a screen recording, and a recording of a screen is a real recording.
That defence is the problem, not the excuse.
Fakes do not travel as clean files with their credentials intact. They travel as screen recordings, re-encodes, screenshots of screenshots, filmed off somebody’s phone in a hurry. The one case where the detector has an excuse is the only case that ever happens.
Google’s answer works if the image reaches you through Google, unaltered, and you already suspected it.
That is not how any of this arrives.
There is another problem that Google doesn’t count. The official who now gets to look at a genuine photograph of a genuine atrocity and say: AI.
He doesn’t need the tool for that. He needs everyone to know the tool exists.
If you have never verified anything in your life, here is why a less playfull mapping app matters.
When a photograph turns up online claiming to show a bombed hospital, a refugee camp or a burning refinery, somebody has to decide whether it’s true before a newspaper prints it. What they have is a reference — a picture of that same place, taken from above or from the street, that everybody agrees is real.
They put the claim next to the reference and they look at the gap.
Google built that reference and it is not a small thing. Street View passed 10 million miles of road in 2019. It now holds more than 280 billion images across over 110 countries. Google Earth turned twenty this year. Between them they are a photographic record of the physical world, and — this is the part that matters — every frame of it is dated.
Dated is the whole trick. If you know when the picture was taken, you can prove when something appeared.
In July 2014 the Russian Ministry of Defence held a press conference and produced satellite images about the downing of MH17. Bellingcat compared them against the dated archive in Google Earth and found the landscape didn’t match the dates claimed. The MoD images were fabricated.
Bellingcat published the walkthrough under the headline Who to Trust, Google or the Russian MoD?
In 2015, that was a rhetorical question. Not anymore.
Volkel
There is a village in North Brabant, ninety minutes from my desk, called Volkel. It has an air base. That air base stores American B61 nuclear bombs, a fact the Dutch government has never confirmed, which became public through a leaked diplomatic cable and was later described by a former Dutch prime minister as absolutely pointless.
On Google’s maps, Volkel spent years as a rash of coloured pixels. So did the ammunition depot at Staphorst. So did a Patriot missile site in Limburg, and several royal palaces, because the Dutch approach to hiding a military installation was to paint a large abstract artwork on top of it. The photographer Mishka Henner collected them into a gallery and sold them as art, which tells you how well the hiding worked.
Tonight it is all in the open, and anyone who wants a missile site in Limburg can simply add one.
Now notice what that entire twenty-year argument assumed.
You only censor a map that works. Every blur, every polygon, every diplomatic request was an admission that Google Earth was accurate enough to be dangerous. Governments were not worried the map would lie. They were worried it would tell the truth.
Google’s position never wavered. It does not blur satellite imagery by choice. Sites come pre-obscured because a government or a supplier requires it as a condition of flying over.
So to take one real building out of Google Earth, you need a state.
To put a nuclear plant into Iran, I needed a sentence.
The asymmetry is not meant to be funny. For twenty years the danger was a map that revealed something true, and there was a procedure for that — a law, a ministry, a condition on the overflight permit. Tonight the danger is a map that shows something which was never there, and for that there is no procedure at all.
The cars nobody moved
Somebody already did the hard version of what I did tonight.
In February 2025 a Google Earth satellite pass photographed a parking lot at the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama, Bahrain. Ordinary cars, ordinary rows.
A year later those cars were on X, in a photograph of the same base supposedly flattened by an Iranian drone strike.
Same cars. Same rows. Same spaces, vehicle for vehicle.
Somebody generated a war zone and forgot to move the Toyotas.
The Tehran Times posted it as a before-and-after of a US radar site in Qatar. It was not Qatar. It was Bahrain. The “before” was a genuine Google Earth capture from 10 February 2025. The “after” was made with Google AI — AFP and BBC Verify both ran it through Google’s signature detector and got a hit. It passed 950,000 views before anyone counted the parking spaces.
Building it took six steps. Screenshot Earth. Open Gemini. Upload. Prompt. Download. Crop. Six chances to get bored, and one forger who got bored at the parking lot.
Tonight, Manama can be changed in seconds with Nano Banana.
How to fight this?
Upload a suspicious satellite image to Gemini, ad @verifyai and it will tell you if Google is behind the forgery.
Adjudicate off Google entirely. Sentinel-2 is free and refreshes every five or six days. Landsat, Planet, Airbus, Vantor. You want a sensor with an orbit, a collection time and a resolution you can check.
Take two collects. Todd Myers at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency said it before any of this existed: for every collect, you need a duplicate collect from different sources.
Check the orbit. If an image claims a specific satellite at a specific hour, the published orbital elements will tell you whether anything was up there. The most boring check in the toolkit, and the only one no model can fake, because it isn’t about the pixels.
Disclosure
I build ImageWhisperer. Google technology is part of it, not the whole of it. No single score is ever the finding.
Digital Digging with Henk van Ess is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
“The Blizzard of 2026 certainly achieved a pinnacle ranking in the memories of those who experienced it and climatologically in the historical rankings of snowstorms,” said a NOAA report confirming Rhode Island met the requirement for disaster aid.
Presidents retain sole authority over granting federal disaster aid to states, but it’s highly unusual to deny a governor’s request after FEMA field offices have verified that damage estimates exceeded preestablished levels, according to a former agency official who worked under Republican and Democratic administrations.
“I can’t think of a time a declaration was denied” for a state that met FEMA and NOAA standards, said the former FEMA official who was granted anonymity to speak about internal decision making.
The emails and documents, which haven’t previously been reported, shed new light on Trump’s decisions to reject an overwhelming number of requests for disaster aid from Democratic-led states, even as he has approved nearly 90 percent of requests from states that are governed by members of his own party. The revelations also offer a fuller picture of Trump’s tenure over the most partisan distribution of FEMA aid since the agency was created in 1979.
Trump’s recent rejections involving snow diverge from the actions of other presidents, including Trump in his first term, who routinely approved similar requests from governors of opposing parties.
Presidents since George W. Bush approved all 69 state requests for snow assistance that met FEMA standards except for a 2016 request from New Mexico, which was being investigated for mishandling FEMA funds, according to a POLITICO analysis of agency records.
The four states sought $227 million in aid altogether after the paralyzing February storm dumped record snowfall over areas of the East Coast, leading to unprecedented snow-removal costs. POLITICO obtained the emails and state documents through open records requests submitted to New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. New York officials said federal agencies also validated their request for aid, but POLITICO could not independently confirm that.
President Donald Trump arrives at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on Monday. | Alex Brandon/AP
The Trump administration defended its denials. Neither FEMA or a White House spokesperson answered questions about why the states’ requests were rejected after meeting federal thresholds that historically have triggered the disbursement of aid.
“There is no politicization to the President’s decisions on disaster relief,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. Trump handles disaster requests “with great care” to ensure state aid is used “to supplement — not substitute, their obligation to respond to and recover from disasters.”
A farming couple works the land. (Photo by Michael DeYoung via Getty Images)
Along with my controversial view that dogs aren’t people, a subtly significant claim I believe to be accurate and consequential is that farms aren’t nature.
I think the vast majority of people, including people with a healthy appreciation for the value of economic growth, think there’s an important role for public policy in preserving nature. The exact nature of that role is, of course, controversial. You don’t see Donald Trump pushing to sell the Grand Canyon to build a golf course or California YIMBYs calling for midrise apartments in Yosemite. But outside of the most obvious examples, people have somewhat different intuitions as to what nature even is.
For example, London (like other British cities) is surrounded by an extensive green belt in which housing development is heavily restricted. This is obviously a costly economic policy given the country’s acute housing shortage. What I think is not clear from the map is that the “green” in the green belt is not parks or woodland but mostly farms with a smattering of golf courses and other sports facilities.
In the United States, we don’t typically have policies like that. One exception, though, is that Montgomery County in the D.C. suburbs has an extensive Agricultural Reserve where, similarly, suburban sprawl is banned.
But what you get in exchange for the development ban is not parkland or nature preserves but (mostly) small farms that absent regulation would not be an economical use of the land. Many of these appear to be hobby farms or derive the majority of their revenue from use as wedding venues or the like. Regardless, the Agricultural Reserve is, in effect, a kind of super-duper large-lot zoning, not a “conservation” policy as I would understand it.
Freddie deBoer called me out the other day for some intemperate remarks on British cultural and political attitudes toward housing, and I think he had a basically fair point. I try to advocate for pragmatic, non-expressive politics, and when it comes to the United States of America I think I do a pretty good job of it. Since I don’t actually live in Britain or cover British politics professionally, it can be fun to mouth off. But it’s bad practice. So I’ll say that I do not really understand the culture, legacy, or history of these British green belts. I will simply observe that in the United States of America, we do not normally understand farms to be part of the category of “nature” that we are trying to protect with environmental law, and this is a strength of American society. But we do have exceptions, and I’m a bit concerned that these exceptions are growing.
I’m writing from Maine, a state renowned for its natural beauty.
It’s also a state that after decades of population decline has seen rapid population growth since Covid, which is creating a lot of pressure on housing prices. That’s especially true because the places where remote workers want to live — and therefore where people who want jobs doing locally facing services for remote workers want to live — are not necessarily the mill towns that lost population during the decline years. The state has passed some major YIMBY laws to address the housing crisis, but I think common sense says that the state will also want to take measures to ensure the preservation of the aforementioned natural beauty.
In a conservation easement, a landowner stipulates that future development will be restricted on all or part of a property. Enforcement of the conservation easement falls to one of the various land trusts that exist around the state. The restriction reduces the fair market value of the property, which generates an income tax deduction (and, if applicable, estate tax savings) while also lowering the landowner’s property-tax liability. In exchange, the status quo is preserved.
This broadly makes sense to me. The former owner of a property I can see across the water from my house placed it under a conservation easement in partnership with the Maine Coast Heritage Trust. It is nice to look at from afar and makes for a fun, easy hike to take visitors on.
But there’s no legal requirement that a conservation easement involve opening the land to the public like this. What’s more, there’s not even a legal requirement that it be a nature preserve! From a tax standpoint, what’s going on is that by forswearing development rights, you are reducing the value of the land.
Nearby, the Blue Hill Heritage Trust has a Farmland Forever program that encourages people to create conservation easements that stipulate that land cannot be used for future housing development because it’s going to be a farm.
It’s of course true that if you take a parcel of land that could potentially be valuable if subdivided into housing and say “nope, this is going to be a farm forever,” this reduces the economic value of the land. But is giving a person a tax break for doing something economically perverse with a parcel of land really a good idea? What if a plumber had agreed in 2002 to stipulate that his plumbing business would never use cell phones or email or launch a website? That would reduce the value of the business. But you wouldn’t want the tax code to encourage people to run their businesses in a dumb way.
You can even go to fundraising dinners at the local country club where upscale residents will, I guess, donate money to the cause of encouraging people to get tax breaks for restricting housing development on their land.
It seems like it’s basically just NIMBYism with a vague high-minded gloss.
Blue Hill Heritage Trust grimly warns that “as land values rise and properties are subdivided, agricultural land can quickly be converted to housing and other uses. Once these productive soils are developed, they are effectively removed from agricultural use forever.” That may or may not be true, but it’s absolutely true that once land is placed under a perpetual conservation easement barring residential development, it is (by definition) removed from residential use forever. And for what? Small-scale New England farms haven’t been a major part of the American economy since railroads were built in the late 19th century.
Which, of course, is not to say that people shouldn’t be allowed to operate farms in Maine or wherever else they want to. I like farmers’ markets and paying a premium for fresh local produce as much as the next upscale liberal.
But I also want people to have places to live and reasonable commutes. I want builders and the people who manufacture the stuff that goes into homes to have jobs. I want towns to have tax revenue so they can support schools and roads. Bearing an economic cost to preserve nature seems reasonable to me. But part of how you get there is you allow more development so your town has a larger revenue base. That lets your town acquire more choice parcels for parkland rather than just freezing random small-scale developments in amber.
The big tradeoff
Cutesy farms in cutesy coastal towns are a kind of funny edge case for both nature conservation and agriculture.
What I think is underappreciated, though, is the tradeoff around the large commercially viable farming operations that genuinely underpin the American agricultural sector and, to some extent, the entire global food system.
These farms are mostly not cutesy, and people express relatively little desire to preserve them. Indeed, they often express the desire to have less nasty “agribusiness” and more cutesy farms.
The problem with this is that, as Michael Grunwald’s great book on agriculture from last year points out, the big nasty commercially viable farms are the way they are because they are dramatically more efficient. A single cutesy farm in a cutesy town looks nice, but it’s not producing enough food to feed the town. Agriculture that is less intensive, less efficient, and more localized would require widespread deforestation. And yet even with relatively intensive modern methods, the national footprint of agriculture is much larger than all the cities and suburban subdivisions and strip malls combined. Over a third of federally owned land is used for grazing.
I’m not going to say that this is bad; obviously, it’s good to have food.
But it does underscore that biofuels subsidies are a crazy agricultural policy. Shrinking the footprint of nature in order to grow more corn in order to turn corn into a gasoline additive is ridiculous — especially if you keep in mind that farms aren’t nature.
I heard Bill McKibben tell Ezra Klein recently that America doesn’t need more energy because “we already use huge quantities of it, and we use it strangely.” This is wrong, though. If we had much more abundant energy, then vertical farming would be economically viable for at least some crops and we could get by with much less farmland — and much less pesticide — and have more room for homes and for nature.
And that’s the general point. If you’re interested in the subject of human activity encroaching on the natural realm, then agriculture is by far the main way in which this happens. If you adopt a kind of anti-urban, anti-housing politics whereby farmland is conceived of as a form of nature, you not only end up engaging in costly forms of farmland preservation, but you ultimately undermine the goal of preserving actual wild landscapes, wildlife habitats, and recreational amenities.
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