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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

#131

Post by olex »

joenot443 wrote: post #122
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…

Super cool, man. Watching pro Geoguessr is my latest break-time activity, these geo-gods never cease to impress me. One thing I'm curious about - in high level play, how much of the meta involves knowing characteristics about the photography/equipment/etc. that Google used when they shot it? Frequently I'll watch rainbolt immediately know an African country from nothing but the road, is there something I'm missing?

In the stream commentary for some of competitive Geoguessr I've watched, they definitely often mention the color and shape of the car (visible edges, shadow, reflections), so I assume pro players know which cars were used where very well.

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

#132

Post by neom »

I took one of the conversations you linked, and used it to find out what else it knows about you. "In simple terms: Simon represents an elite technologist class — someone who is not merely wealthy or successful but who also shapes technology and information flows themselves, especially in open systems. His socioeconomic profile is "creator of value," not merely "consumer of value."

If you want, I could sketch a socioeconomic archetype like "The Free Agent Technologist" that would match people like him really well. Would you like me to?"

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

#133

Post by Xplune13 »

I'm not sure whether it's just the o4-mini which is failing this task for me or what, but it did not perform well on the pictures I provided. I took a screenshot of the photo both the times to avoid any metadata input.

E.g. I first gave it a passage inside of Basel Main Train Station which included a text 'Sprüngli', a Swiss brand. The model got that part correct, but it suggested Zurich which wasn't the case.

The second picture was a lot tougher. It was an inner courtyard of a museum in Metz, and the model missed right from the start and after roaming around a bit (in terms of places), it just went back to its first guess which was a museum in Paris. It recognized that the photo was from some museum or a crypt, but even the city name of 'Metz' never occurred in its reasoning.

All in all, it's still pretty cool to see it reason and make sense out of the image, but for a bit lesser exposed places, it doesn't perform well.

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

#134

Post by otterley »

plsbenice34 wrote: post #102
OutOfHere wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What’s the impact to you?

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

#135

Post by vessenes »

bobro wrote: post #109
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.

A) o3 is remarkably good, better than benchmarks seem to indicate in many circumstances

B) it definitely cheats when it can — see this chat where it cheated by extracting EXIF data and wasn’t ashamed when I complained about it cheating: https://chatgpt.com/share/6802e229-c6a0-800f-898a-44171a0c7d...

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

#136

Post by anotherpaulg »

I've long been fascinated by AI's ability to do the reverse: generate photos with lots of highly relevant content when the prompt includes a location. Terrain, plants, buildings, landmarks, coastlines and lots of details are included.

Here's an example [0] for "Riding e-scooters along the waterfront in Auckland". The iconic spire is correctly included, but so are many small details about the waterfront.

I've been meaning to harness this into a very-low-bandwidth image compression system. Where you take a photo and crunch it to an absurdly low resolution that includes EXIF data with GPS, date/time. You then reconstruct the fine details with AI.

Most photos are taken where lots of photos are taken, so the models have probably been appropriately trained.

[0] https://chatgpt.com/share/680d0008-54a0-8012-91b7-6b1794f485...

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

#137

Post by mcbuilder »

AstroBen wrote: post #51
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.

Accessible to anyone, superhuman levels of deductive reasoning to pick out your location from super minor details in an innocent photo? That could certainly be dystopian

It certainly could be, but not all technological advancement is necessarily dystopian. You say, currently everyone now has access to this, while before it was only available to nation states who could hire teams of skilled analyst s. I mean, I agree it's scary that now a stalker could track a victim, but cars and cameras probably help as well. So, I think it's fair to challenge "dystopian", someone will use it for non-nefarious purposes.

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

#138

Post by otterley »

croes wrote: post #78

And now imagine what the Trump administration can do with such tools

Even without this tool, they have many more at their disposal to accomplish their goals. Practically anyone who possesses a cell phone, or communicates with anyone who does, can be quickly located. They have aircraft and plenty of physical surveillance equipment as well.

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

#139

Post by kenjackson »

casey2 wrote: post #127

surreal and dystopian is realizing that the US military has likely had (much) better tech than this for at least a decade.

The US military probably has tons of satellite data that they can cross against an image, but not the automated reasoning. But put those two together and it really gets scary.
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