The Cost of Checking Every AI Box
Enough has been said about the botched rollout and subsequent reversal of a generative-AI feature in Google Earth. I’m wondering why this keeps happening: rushed AI rollouts with no one questioning whether they are a good idea in the first place.
We are living through a corporate panic. In boardrooms across Silicon Valley, leadership is terrorized by the prospect of being left behind in the generative AI gold rush. The mandate from the top has devolved into a blunt directive: Add AI to everything, everywhere, immediately. I felt this at the end of my time at Google I can only imagine how much stronger this has become…
It doesn’t matter if the product calls for it. It doesn’t matter if the product’s entire historical equity is built on being an objective record of reality. If a product doesn’t have a generative text-to-image prompt box slapped onto it, senior leadership panics.
In their haste to check an AI box, the architects of this feature completely lost sight of what makes Google Earth valuable. Google Earth is not a canvas for creative writing; it is a reference library. You don’t want an AI “interpreting” or “reimagining” a map any more than you want an AI to creatively hallucinate your bank statement.
Google prides itself on hiring only the smartest talent, to the point that if you don’t have a big-name university or former employer on your CV, it’s likely not going to be looked at. Someone comes up with the idea; fine, we all have silly ideas sometimes. But all these smart people you’ve assembled think it’s a good idea to slap generative AI features on everything without guardrails? Or someone did speak up and wasn’t heard? Or nobody spoke up for fear of repercussions?
Trends have come and gone. Once decision-makers realise how much money they wasted on useless features, this current trend to add AI features everywhere will pass too. What is different from previous trends is that some AI features can be used to produce dangerous results, and a lot of damage will be done before the current craze has passed.