There’s also a big push internally to add AI features to their products. I don’t think this was some shadowy push to discredit satellite imagery (to help Israel I guess?) - the more mundane explanation that this was a poorly conceived feature thought up by some team internally to meet business demands unfortunately rings far more likely to me.

Edit: I want to make it clear that I’m not defending Google or the team that made this feature here. This is awful, and they should have seen it coming. But falling into conspiracies and looking for the man behind the curtain just leads to overlooking the mundane people who just follow orders or fail to consider the impact and ethics of their actions. We can’t reach these people (or consider these lessons for ourselves) if we talk past them (especially if they dismiss criticism as coming from it off touch conspiratists).