I am honestly baffled by these comments, the few times i've given it photos to guess the location, it couldn't guess it even remotely close.
Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
231–240 of 453 posts
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
you never know.. LLM could go full sherlock holmes. Based on the type of grass and the direction of the wind. The type of wood work used. There could be millions of factors that it could factor in and then guess it to a t.
> Based on the type of grass and the direction of the wind. There was a scene in High Potential (murder-of-the-week sleuth savant show) where a crime was solved by (in part) the direction the wind was blowing in a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1ZOzck4bBI
In 2017, the Hollywood actor Shia LaBeouf (and two others artists from a trio called "LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner") put up a flag in an undisclosed location as part of their "HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US" work [1].
> On March 8, 2017, the stream resumed from an "unknown location", with the artists announcing that a flag emblazoned with the words "He Will Not Divide Us" would be flown for the duration of the presidency. The camera was pointed up at the flag, set against a backdrop of nothing but sky. [...], the flag was located by a collaboration of 4chan users, who used airplane contrails, flight tracking, celestial navigation, and other techniques to determine that it was located in Greeneville, Tennessee. In the early hours of March 10, 2017, a 4chan user took down and stole the flag, replacing it with a red 'Make America Great Again' hat and a Pepe the Frog shirt.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaBeouf,_Rönkkö_%26_Turner#HEW...
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#233> 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.
You should also see how it fares with incorrect EXIF data. For example, add EXIF data in the middle of Times Square to a photo of a forest and see what it says.
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#234I am honestly baffled by these comments, the few times i've given it photos to guess the location, it couldn't guess it even remotely close.
Which model and prompt did you use? What kind of photos?
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure if this is true or not but people have pointed out that it uses data from your past conversations to make a guess.
Yeah, I had to turn off chat history after I spotted it doing that.
Also wondering if, as another commenter mentioned, it might be trying to estimate your location just by network means.
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I had to turn off chat history after I spotted it doing that.
Also wondering if, as another commenter mentioned, it might be trying to estimate your location just by network means.
It absolutely does that - o3 knows your current location based on IP address etc. This means for a fair test you need to use a photo taken nowhere near your current vicinity - that's why I added examples for Madagascar and Buenos Aires at the end of my post: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/o3-photo-locations/#up...
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also wondering if, as another commenter mentioned, it might be trying to estimate your location just by network means.
It absolutely does that - o3 knows your current location based on IP address etc. This means for a fair test you need to use a photo taken nowhere near your current vicinity - that's why I added examples for Madagascar and Buenos Aires at the end of my post: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/o3-photo-locations/#up...
Thanks! Looks like I missed that last part somehow :)
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#238Is it an US thing? I tried with 17 pictures from Europe and Asia, not in capital cities but in fairly big cities, and it didn't guess any. Sometimes it got the country correct but that was because of signs, so I could have guessed it too.
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#239I wonder if it can catch spies
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#240Crime fighting will no doubt use these sorts of techniques.
In Australia recently there was a terrible criminal case of massive child abuse.
They caught the guy because he was posting videos and one of them had a blanket which they somehow identified and traced to the child care Centre that he worked at.
It wasn’t done with AI but I can imagine photos and videos being fed into AI in such situations and asked to identify the location/people or other clues.