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Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

simonwillison.net

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Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#101

Post by NitpickLawyer »

pwg wrote: post #53
brookst wrote: post #45

I don’t understand the “dystopian” angle. Maybe I’m just old, but I remember the wonder when the Internet made most knowledge available with a few keystrokes. Having deductive reasoning with the same convenience feels wonderful, not dystopian.

Think: "stalker".

If the person is already a stalker you'd think they'd already know this, no? There's that anecdotal stuff in japan where a vlogger was located by her "fans" from a reflexion of their home bus station or something. The weird people will do weird stuff regardless of technology, IMO.

And the governments are already doing this for decades at least, so ... I think the tech could be a net benefit, as with many other technologies that have matured.

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#102

Post by plsbenice34 »

OutOfHere wrote: post #71
rvz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those who say it is "utopian" are also okay with: "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear". It is dystopian.

The tool is just intelligence. Intelligence itself is not dystopian or utopian. It's what you use it for that makes it so. If you don't want to post a photo, then don't post a photo.

>If you don't want to post a photo, then don't post a photo.

Other people have posted photos of me without my consent, how am i meant to stop that?

If i posted photos 20 years ago when i was a dumb teenager i cant undo that, either

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#103

Post by whimsicalism »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #36

I’m sure there are areas where the location guessing can be scary accurate, like the article managed to guess the exact town as its backup guess. But seeing the chain of thought, I’m confident there are many areas that it will be far less precise. Show it a picture of a trailer park somewhere in Kansas (exclude any signs with the trailer park name and location) and I’ll bet the model only manages to guess the state c…

https://chatgpt.com/share/680cfb2b-bd90-8010-b581-ad26d098e2...

It identified Kansas City in its CoT but didn't output it in its final answer

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Carroll+Creek+Mobile+Home+...

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#104

Post by qarl »

> I’m confident it didn’t cheat and look at the EXIF data on the photograph, because if it had cheated it wouldn’t have guessed Cambria first.

It also, at one point, said it couldn't see any image data at all. You absolutely cannot trust what it says.

You need to re-run with the EXIF data removed.

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#105

Post by NitpickLawyer »

mk89 wrote: post #70
semiquaver wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pure luddism. A human could have done the exact same thing. I’ll also point out that in this case the most confident guess was 200 miles off and the second correct guess was only down to the city level. Not remotely what anyone would consider precise.

A skilled human can do the same thing but not everyone is open to offering this sort of services for certain purposes. Making a tool like this trained on existing map services, for example Google Street images, gives everyone, no matter who, the potential to find someone in no time. These tools are growing like crazy, how long will it take before someone will "democratize" the "location services market"...

> but not everyone is open to offering this sort of services for certain purposes.

Sorry but I call bull on this. Put it on one of the chans with a sob story and it gets "solved" in seconds. Or reddit w/ something bait like "my capitalist boss threatened to let my puppy starve because he wants profits, AITA if I glitter bomb his office?"...

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#106

Post by whimsicalism »

raincole wrote: post #96
simonw wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had already convinced myself through prior experiments that it wasn't using EXIF data, and decided not to spend extra time making my post 100% proof against cynics because I know from past experience that truly dedicated cynics will always find something to invalidate what they are reading. I don't know how "iconic" that rocky outcrop in Madagascar is, to be honest. Google doesn't return much about it.

> truly dedicated cynics I bet a lot of people (on HN at least) thought of "Does it use EXIF?" when they read the title alone, and got surprised that it was not the first thing you tested.

it doesn't use exif most times, it's able to do it consistently from google maps screenshots

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#107

Post by AstroBen »

simonw wrote: post #92
hyperlink014 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely tried to use EXIF data when I asked it to guess the location. Here is proof - https://imgur.com/a/CHde2Cx I couldn't attach the chat directly since it's a temporary chat.

Right, but that's at least evident in the thinking trace. I added a note about that to my post.

How much can we trust the thinking trace? At most it says what's in its training set, but Anthropic showed that's not necessarily accurate for how it gets to its answer

I tried this with a (what I thought was) very generic street image in Bangkok. It guessed the city correctly, saying that "people are wearing yellow which is used to honor the monarchy". Wow, cool. I checked the image again and there's a small Thai flag it didn't mention at all. Seems just as plausible, even likely it picked up on that

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#108

Post by raincole »

SamPatt wrote: post #46
new_user_final wrote: post #2

6 minutes and 48 seconds? Some YouTuber can find the location in 0.1 second. I don't know if those videos are fake.

They aren't fake. I'm a Master I level Geoguessr (the penultimate competitive ranking) and what the pros can do is very real. I looked at the image in the post before seeing the answer and would have guessed near San Francisco. It seems impressive to someone if you haven't played Geoguessr a lot, but you'd be surprised at how much information there is about location from an image. The LLMs are just verbalizing what i…

The fact some humans can do that doesn't make it any less impressive to me.

I knew Terence Tao can solve Math Olympia questions and much much much more difficult questions. I was still very impressed by AlphaProof[0].

[0] https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/ai-solves-imo-problems...

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#109

Post by bobro »

SamPatt wrote: post #63

I play competitive Geoguessr at a fairly high level, and I wanted to test this out to see how it compares. It's astonishingly good. It will use information it knows about you to arrive at the answer - it gave me the exact trailhead of a photo I took locally, and when I asked it how, it mentioned that it knows I live nearby. However, I've given it vacation photos from ages ago, and not only in tourist destinations eit…

Did you include location metadata with the photos by chance? I’m pretty surprised by these results.

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#110

Post by ymarketing »

ekianjo wrote: post #82
simonw wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Little bit less convenient to use on a phone though - and I like that screenshotting should be a more obvious trick to people who don't have a deeper understanding of how EXIF metadata is stored in photo files.

Ffshare on Android is a one second step to remove exif data

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