To be fair the low range, California poppies, and the decorative rope typically found near the coast is a very good hint to even a novice geoguesser.
Having a sign on your fire that says "warning, a fire" is also peak California.
Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
41–50 of 453 posts
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
There have been a few cases where the LLM clearly did look at the EXIF, got the answer, then confabulated a bunch of GeoGusser logic to justify the answer. Sometimes that's presented as deception/misalignment but that's a category error: "find the answer" and "explain your reasoning" are two distinct tasks, and LLMs are not actually smart enough to coherently link them. They do one autocomplete for generating text th…
> Sometimes that's presented as deception/misalignment but that's a category error: "find the answer" and "explain your reasoning" are two distinct tasks Right but if your answer to "explain your reasoning" is not a true representation of your reasoning, then you are being deceptive. If it doesn't "know" its reasoning, then the honest answer is that it doesn't know. (To head off any meta-commentary on humans' inabili…
My point is that dishonesty/misalignment doesn't make sense for o3, which is not capable of being honest because it's not capable of understanding what words mean. It's like saying a monkey at a typewriter is being dishonest if it happens to write a falsehood.
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#43I’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…
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.
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have one link that illustrates what I mean: https://chatgpt.com/share/6802e229-c6a0-800f-898a-44171a0c7d... The line about "the latitudinal light angle that matches mid‑February at ~47 ° N." seems like pure BS to me, and in the reasoning trace it openly reads the EXIF. A more clear example I don't have a link for, it was on Twitter somewhere: someone tested a photo from Suriname and o3 said one of the clues was lef…
Yes! Great example, it's clearly reading EXIF in there. Mind if I link to that from my post?
It's not my example :) Got it from here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43732866
Edit: notice o3 isn't very good at covering its tracks, it got the date/latitude from the EXIF and used that in its explanation of the visual features. (how else would it know this was from February and not December?)
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#45I 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.
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#466 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 is happening in a few seconds in good player's mind.
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
please accidentally post an identifying photo of your neighborhood...
How do you “accidentally post a photo”?
It's possible to accidentally post something, or have it swiped by many of the untrusted and untrustworthy applications on a PC or mobile device.
It's even easier to unintentionally include identifying information when intentionally making a post, whether by failing to catch it when submitting, or by including additional images in your online posting.
There are also wholesale uploads people may make automatically, e.g., when backing up content or transferring data between systems. That may end up unsecured or in someone else's hands.
Even very obscure elements may identify a very specific location. There's a story of how a woman's location was identified by the interior of her hotel room, I believe by the doorknobs. An art piece placed in a remote Utah location was geolocated based on elements of the geology, sun angle, and the like, within a few hours. The art piece is discussed in this NPR piece: https://www.npr.org/2020/11/28/939629355/unraveling-the-myst...> (2020).
Geoguessing of its location: https://web.archive.org/web/20201130222850/https://www.reddi...>
Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_monolith>
These are questions which barely deserve answering, let alone asking, in this day and age.
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#48Who knows if they're on purpose untraining this ability of the model though, seems like that would go away in a 'safety' finetune.
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sometimes that's presented as deception/misalignment but that's a category error: "find the answer" and "explain your reasoning" are two distinct tasks Right but if your answer to "explain your reasoning" is not a true representation of your reasoning, then you are being deceptive. If it doesn't "know" its reasoning, then the honest answer is that it doesn't know. (To head off any meta-commentary on humans' inabili…
My point is that dishonesty/misalignment doesn't make sense for o3, which is not capable of being honest because it's not capable of understanding what words mean. It's like saying a monkey at a typewriter is being dishonest if it happens to write a falsehood.
You seem to be saying that only sentient beings can lie, which is too semantic for my tastes.
But AI models can certainly 1) provide incorrect information, and even 2) reason that providing incorrect information is the best course of action.
Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
#50Dystopian: the surveillance potential, both from a big surveillance (corporate / government / political) and an individual surveillance (stalkers) perspective.
Not dystopian: the crime solving potential, the research potential, the historical narrative reconstruction potential, etc.
It's a pattern I keep seeing over and over again. There seem to be a lot of values that we can obtain, individually or collectively, by bartering privacy in exchange for them.
If we had a sane world with sane, reliable, competent leadership, this would be less of a concern. But unfortunately we seem to have abdicated leadership globally to a political class that is increasingly incompetent and unhinged. My hypothesis on this is that sane, reasonable people are repelled from politics due to the emotional and social toxicity of that sector, leaving the sector to narcissists and delusional ideologues.
Unfortunately if we're going to abdicate our political sphere to narcissists and delusional ideologues, sacrificing privacy at the same time is a recipe for any number of really bad outcomes.