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

81–90 of 453 posts

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

#81

Post by simonw »

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…

Is that flashcard deck a commercial/community project or is it something you assembled yourself? Sounds fascinating!

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

#82

Post by ekianjo »

simonw wrote: post #65
pwg wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the addition: > (EXIF stripped via screenshotting) Just a note, it is not necessary to "screenshot" to remove EXIF data. There are numerous tools that allow editing/removal of EXIF data (e.g., exiv2: https://exiv2.org/ , exiftool: https://exiftool.org/ , or even jpegtran with the "-copy none" option https://linux.die.net/man/1/jpegtran ). Using a screenshot to strip EXIF produces a reduced quality image (scaled…

Little bit less convenient to use on a phone though - and I like that screenshotting should be a more obvious trick to people who don't have a deeper understanding of how EXIF metadata is stored in photo files.

Ffshare on Android is a one second step to remove exif data

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

#83

Post by simonw »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #64

Why would you go to all the trouble of creating a blog post about this but leave the EXIF data in the image and then proclaim that it probably works without the EXIF too? Why not remove the EXIF in the first place? The two EXIF-less examples given in the update very clearly show iconic landmarks, which makes guessing very easy.

I had already convinced myself through prior experiments that it wasn't using EXIF data, and decided not to spend extra time making my post 100% proof against cynics because I know from past experience that truly dedicated cynics will always find something to invalidate what they are reading.

I don't know how "iconic" that rocky outcrop in Madagascar is, to be honest. Google doesn't return much about it.

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

#84

Post by jillesvangurp »

If you want to exclude memory and exif data, just open streetview in some random corner of the world and take a screenshot (avoiding any text obviously). It's pretty good if you give it enough to reason with.

It basically iterates on coming up with some hypothesis and then does web searches to validate those.

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

#85

Post by brookst »

simonw wrote: post #67
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.

Have you ever known anyone who's escaped from an abusive relationship? It's not at all uncommon for people to have legitimate reasons not to be found.

Sure, but what does this change? Plenty of people are better geoguessers than this LLM. Anyone trying to find someone who is both trying not to be found and posting pictures publicly is just going to copy them to Reddit and ask “where is this”.

I’m not a fan of this variation on “think of the children”. It has always been possible to deduce location from images. The fact that LLMs can also do it changes exactly nothing about the privacy considerations of sharing photos.

It’s fine to fear AI but this is a really weak angle to come at it from.

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

#86

Post by brookst »

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

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

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

#87

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

hashemian wrote: post #21

To those argue that LLMs might cheat by using EXIF, I saw a post recently on twitter ( https://x.com/tszzl/status/1915212958755676350 ) and out of curiosity, screen-captured the photo and passed it to O3. So no EXIF. You can read the chat here: https://chatgpt.com/share/680a449f-d8dc-8001-88f4-60023323c7... It took 4.5m to guess the location. The guess was accurate (checked using Google Street View). What was amazing…

I don't see how this is mind blowing, or even mildly surprising! It's essentially going to use the set of features detected in the photo as a filter to find matching photos in the training set, and report the most frequent matches. Sometimes it'll get it right, sometimes not.

It'd be interesting to see the photo in the linked story at same resolution as provided to o3, since the licence plate in the photo in the story is at way lower resolution than the zoomed in version shown that o3 had access to. It's not a great piece of primary evidence to focus on though since a CA plate doesn't have to mean the car is in CA.

The clues that o3 doesn't seem to be paying attention to seems just as notable as the ones it does. Why is it not talking about car models, felt roof tiles, sash windows, mini blinds, fire pit (with warning on glass, in english), etc?

Being location-doxxed by a computer trained on a massive set of photos is unsurprising, but the example given doesn't seem a great example of why this could/will be a game changer in terms of privacy. There's not much detective work going on here - just narrowing the possibilities based on some of the available information, and happening to get it right in this case.

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

#88

Post by simonw »

brookst wrote: post #85
simonw wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever known anyone who's escaped from an abusive relationship? It's not at all uncommon for people to have legitimate reasons not to be found.

Sure, but what does this change? Plenty of people are better geoguessers than this LLM. Anyone trying to find someone who is both trying not to be found and posting pictures publicly is just going to copy them to Reddit and ask “where is this”. I’m not a fan of this variation on “think of the children”. It has always been possible to deduce location from images. The fact that LLMs can also do it changes exactly nothi…

Same as with other forms of automation: it makes this capability much easier for bad actors to obtain.

I've got the impression that geoguessing has at least a loose code of ethics associated with it. I imagine you'd have to work quite hard to find someone with those skills to help you stalk your ex - you'd have to mislead them about your goal, at least.

Or you can sign up for ChatGPT and have as many goes as you like with as many photos as you can find.

I have a friend who's had trouble with stalkers. I'm making sure they're aware that this kind of thing has just got a lot easier.

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

#89

Post by hyperlink014 »

hashemian wrote: post #21

To those argue that LLMs might cheat by using EXIF, I saw a post recently on twitter ( https://x.com/tszzl/status/1915212958755676350 ) and out of curiosity, screen-captured the photo and passed it to O3. So no EXIF. You can read the chat here: https://chatgpt.com/share/680a449f-d8dc-8001-88f4-60023323c7... It took 4.5m to guess the location. The guess was accurate (checked using Google Street View). What was amazing…

It absolutely tried to use EXIF data when I asked it to guess the location. Here is proof - https://imgur.com/a/CHde2Cx

I couldn't attach the chat directly since it's a temporary chat.

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

#90

Post by hyperlink014 »

simonw wrote: post #83
IAmGraydon wrote: post #64

Why would you go to all the trouble of creating a blog post about this but leave the EXIF data in the image and then proclaim that it probably works without the EXIF too? Why not remove the EXIF in the first place? The two EXIF-less examples given in the update very clearly show iconic landmarks, which makes guessing very easy.

I had already convinced myself through prior experiments that it wasn't using EXIF data, and decided not to spend extra time making my post 100% proof against cynics because I know from past experience that truly dedicated cynics will always find something to invalidate what they are reading. I don't know how "iconic" that rocky outcrop in Madagascar is, to be honest. Google doesn't return much about it.

It absolutely tried to use EXIF data when I asked it to guess the location. Here is proof - https://imgur.com/a/CHde2Cx

I couldn't attach the chat directly since it's a temporary chat.

Post reply on HN