Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 453 posts

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

#181

Post by simonw »

SamPatt wrote: post #167
simonw wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a feel for how often StreetView published fresh imagery? When that happens, is there a wild flurry of activity in the GeoGuessr community as players race to figure out the latest patterns?

Google updates Street View fairly frequently, but most of the updates are in developed nations and they're simply updating coverage with the same camera quality and don't change the meta. However every once in a while you'll get huge updates - new countries getting coverage, or a country with older coverage getting new camera generation coverage, etc. And yes, the community watches for these updates and very quickly…

That zi8gzag video was fascinating, thanks for that.

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

#182

Post by wongarsu »

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…

I tried with various street photographs from a medium-sized German city (one of the 50 largest, but well outside the top 4). No obscure locations, all within a 15 minute walk of the city center and it got 1/7 correct. That one was scarily precise, but the other ones got various versions of "Not enough information, looks European" or in better cases "somewhere in Germany".

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

#183

Post by qarl »

simonw wrote: post #158
qarl wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I agree entirely: LLMs can produce very entertaining content. I daresay that in this case, the content is interesting because it appears to be the actual thought process. However, if it is actually using EXIF data as you initially dismissed, then all of this is just a fiction. Which, I think, makes it dramatically less entertaining. Like true crime - it's much less fun if it's not true.

I have now proven to myself that the models really can guess locations from photographs to the point where I am willing to stake my credibility on their ability to do that. (Or, if you like, "trust me, bro".)

[flagged]

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

#184

Post by thegeomaster »

wongarsu wrote: post #179
thegeomaster wrote: post #39

For all of the images I've tried, the base model (e.g. 4o) already has a ~95% accurate idea of where the photo is, and then o3 does so much tool use only to confirm its intuition from the base model and slightly narrow down. For OP's initial image, 4o in fact provides a more accurate initial guess of Carmel-by-the-Sea (d=~100mi The clue is in the CoT - you can briefly see the almost correct location as the very first…

4o is already really good. For most of the pictures I tried they gave comparable results. However for one image 4o was only able to narrow it down the the country level (even with your CoT prompt it listed three plausible countries) while o3 was able to narrow it down to the correct area in the correct city, being off by only about 500m. That's an impressive jump

Is it possible to share the picture? I've been looking for exactly that kind of jump the other day when playing around.

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

#185

Post by simonw »

qarl wrote: post #183
simonw wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have now proven to myself that the models really can guess locations from photographs to the point where I am willing to stake my credibility on their ability to do that. (Or, if you like, "trust me, bro".)

[flagged]

Well that sucks, I thought I was being extremely transparent in my writing about this.

I've updated my post several times based on feedback here and elsewhere already, and I showed my working at every step.

Can't please everyone.

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

#186

Post by simonw »

skydhash wrote: post #180
simonw wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, are you at all surprised that this technology did not exist two years ago?

Did it not, or no one was interested enough to build one? I’m pretty certain there’s a database of portraits somewhere where they search id details from photograph. Automatic tagging exists for photo software. I don’t see why that can be extrapolated to landmarks with enough data.

If it existed two years ago I certainly couldn't play with it on my phone.

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

#187

Post by cco »

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?

Meh, meta is so boring and uninteresting to me personally. Knowing you're in Kenya because of the snorkel, that's just simple memorization. Pick up on geography, architecture, language, sun and street position; that's what I love.

It's clearly necessary to compete at the high level though.

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

#188

Post by throwaway84674 »

plsbenice34 wrote: post #145
otterley wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the impact to you?

I had a stalker in the past. I feel more comfortable without him knowing where i live. In general i have a strong need for privacy. Not having privacy is generally unsettling, in the same way that i close the door when using a toilet or having a shower. I am disturbed by people that don't seem to have an understanding of that concept.

Being able to locate people through photos is nothing new. Yes, AI made it more accessible, but it should've always been a part of your threat model.

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

#189

Post by andrewmcwatters »

qarl wrote: post #104

> 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.

And, these models' architectures are changing over time in ways that I can't tell if they're "hallucinating" their responses about being able to do something or not, because some multimodal models are entirely token based, including transforming on image token and audio token data, and some are entirely isolated systems glued together.

You can't know unless you know specifically what that model's architecture is, and I'm not at all up-to-date on which of OpenAI's are now only textual tokens or multimodal ones.

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

#190

Post by qarl »

simonw wrote: post #185
qarl wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Well that sucks, I thought I was being extremely transparent in my writing about this. I've updated my post several times based on feedback here and elsewhere already, and I showed my working at every step. Can't please everyone.

You ARE being extremely transparent. That's not what I complained about.

My complaint is that you're saying "trust me" and that isn't transparent in the least.

Am I wrong?

Post reply on HN