Dried up Danube, muddy glacier… An Austrian NGO has published images on Google Maps generated by artificial intelligence to warn of the future that global warming could have in store for us.
“People prepare their vacations with Google Maps and Austria is a tourist country, so we wanted to show what the climate catastrophe has in store for its beautiful landscapes,” Marina Hagen-Canaval, from the Letzte Generation collective, explained to AFP on Friday. (Last generation).
The dozens of images of Tyrolean peaks, lakes and Vienna were created from real shots, then reworked by AI and posted on Google Maps as if they had been taken in the future, in May 2070.
“A not so distant deadline”, underlines Marina Hagen-Canaval, “that those like us who are between 30 and 40 years old have a good chance of seeing with their own eyes”.
AFP was able to find some of these photos on Google Maps showing stony summits or lakes deprived of fresh water.
Unsere wunderschönen Heimat ???????? Könnte in Zukunft bald ganz anders ausschauen, wenn wir nicht sofort Maßnahmen ergreifen…. pic.twitter.com/6RLH3iAyct
— Letzte Generation Österreich (@letztegenAT) June 20, 2024
This time, the demonstration is only “digital” for Letzte Generation, known for attracting attention by the multiplication of spectacular actions, such as blocking roads during rush hour.
Investing online now means being able to get the message across to “even more people”, being “where the people are”: “on the Internet as well as in the street”, she summed up.
When contacted, Google was not immediately able to comment or say whether it would remove the modified images.
Due to the greenhouse gases generated by these human activities, the planet has already warmed on average nearly 1.2°C since the pre-industrial era. Most of this warming has occurred in the last 50 years.