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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

#291

Post by Timwi »

jdiff wrote: post #262
i_have_an_idea wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“best where the actual logic isn’t very hard”? yeah, well it’s also one of the top scorers on the Math olympiads

My guess is that those questions are very typical and follow very normal patterns and use well established processes. Give it something weird and it'll continuously trip over itself. My current project is nothing too bizarre, it's a 3D renderer. Well-trodden ground. But my project breaks a lot of core assumptions and common conventions, and so any LLM I try to introduce—Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude 3.7 Thinking, o3—they al…

> Give it something weird and it'll continuously trip over itself.

And so will almost all humans. It's weird how people refuse to ascribe any human-level intelligence to it until it starts to compete with the world top elite.

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

#292

Post by SamPatt »

xlii wrote: post #209

Tried the same, results made me laugh. Completely clueless. I've seen passing prompts 8 about how it's not in the city I am and yet it tries again and again. My favourite moment was when it started analysing piece of blurry asphalt. After 6 minutes o3 it was confidently wrong: https://imgur.com/a/jYr1fz1 IMO not-in-US is actually great test if something was in LLMs data and the whole search is a for show.

I'm surprised to hear that. I keep running tests and the results are incredible, not only in the US.

For example, here's a screenshot from a random location I found in Google Street View in Jordan:

https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/sampatt/media@main/posts/2025-04...

And here's o3 nailing it:

https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/sampatt/media@main/posts/2025-04...

Maybe using Google Street View images, zoomed out, tends to give more useful information? I'm unsure why there's such variance.

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

#293

Post by SamPatt »

pinkorchid wrote: post #287
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…

Note that they can claim to guess a location based on reasonable clues, but actually use EXIF data. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43732866 Maybe it's not what happened in your examples, but definitely something to keep an eye on.

Yes, I'm aware. I've been using screenshots only to avoid that. Check my last few comments for examples without EXIF data if you're interested to see o3's capabilities.

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

#294

Post by _heimdall »

simonw wrote: post #268
_heimdall wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been surprised that so much focus was put on generative uses for LLMs and similar ML tools. It seems to me like they have a way better chance of being useful when tasked with interpreting given information rather than generating something meant to appear new.

Yeah, the "generative" in "generative AI" gives a little bit of a false impression. I like Laurie Voss's take on this: https://seldo.com/posts/what-ive-learned-about-writing-ai-ap... > Is what you're doing taking a large amount of text and asking the LLM to convert it into a smaller amount of text? Then it's probably going to be great at it. If you're asking it to convert into a roughly equal amount of text it will b…

I've had coworkers tell me it works Copilot works well for refactoring code, which also makes sense in the same vein.

Its like they wouldn't be so controversial if they didn't decide to market it as "generative" or "AI"...I assume fund raising valuations would move inline with the level of controversy though.

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

#295

Post by brookst »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #193
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.

That's because you haven't lived in an authoritarian regime. NKVD, STASI, Gestapo, would all have killed for such capabilities. As an east european who grew up and lived in such a regime, I would like to respectfully remind all westerners their care-free and free lives is a privilege the majority of the world doesn't have.

No, you misunderstand me.

Look at all the people in this thread talking about how people are fantastic at guessing locations from photos. This is not a new thing.

"If you want something to be secret don't post it online" is a principle that far predates LLMs. It's still true. It always was. The idea that authoritarian regimes had no way to place the location of photos before this is laughable.

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

#296

Post by brookst »

simonw wrote: post #98
brookst wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can post to r/geogussr. Has that been dystopian all this time and I never noticed?

Honestly, yes it's a bit dystopian that a forum online exists where anyone can post a photo and experts from all around the world will help them figure out the exact location of that photo. Lots of things that exist in our world today are mildly dystopian.

I guess that's the heart of the disagreement -- to me "mildly dystopian" is a very funny phrase. Dystopia / Utopia are extremes; perfect and perfectly bad.

If we're calling potentially abusable things "dystopian" then, ok, sure. But then you have to let me call unscented soap "utopian", since it is at least mildly utopian.

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

#297

Post by leptons »

numpad0 wrote: post #72
mk89 wrote: post #55

This tool just makes it easier for weirdos to achieve their goals at stalking women and kids. Crazy that this is even allowed. Who the hell needs to know the precise location of a picture, besides law enforcement? A rough location is most of the time sufficient. Like a region, a state, or a landscape (e.g., when you see the Bing background pictures, it's nice to see where they were taken). This tool will give a boost…

I can't believe such a comment is posted now in 2025. Everyone had moved on from that kind of thing at least a decade ago. Or are there some parts of the Internet where this would be new?

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. That stalking is a thing of the past? Or maybe that everyone expects to be stalked in 2025? Could you be trying to say that with a convicted rapist president, that stalking is encouraged in some countries? Your comment is vague at best.

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

#298

Post by brookst »

AstroBen wrote: post #149
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 techno…

> weird people will do weird stuff regardless of technology If I were someone's only stalker, I'd be absolutely hopeless at finding their location from images. I'm really bad at it if I don't know the location first hand But now, suddenly with AI I'm close to an expert. The accessibility of just uploading an image to ChatGPT means everyone has an easy way of abusing it, not just a small percentage of the population

So I guess the evil we're worried about is stalkers who are bad at guessing locations, bad enough with tech that they don't know about geoguessr websites and subreddits, but good enough with tech to use LLMs?

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

#299

Post by atq2119 »

brookst wrote: post #59
blueprint wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

please accidentally post an identifying photo of your neighborhood...

I live in Belltown, Seattle. Oh no! The world knows my neighborhood!

I'm not particularly fond of the whole "privilege" discourse, but this comment is a great example of somebody completely failing to understand a privilege they have. Which they share with many other people, sure,[0] but there are many people who, through no fault of their own, do need to worry about others learning about their location.

[0] Which is probably one reason why the discourse grates some. Privilege still sounds to me like it's something exclusive, like a 0.1%er thing. Naming stuff is hard.

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