Viral ChatGPT trend is doing 'reverse location search' from photos

The example includes the following &quot;reasoning&quot;:<p>&quot;Left-hand-drive cars, but traffic keeps to the left&quot; -- yet the picture doesn&#x27;t hint at which side traffic drives on.<p>&quot;Language on the shop fascia looks like a Latin alphabet business name rather than Spanish or Portuguese&quot; -- I&#x27;m sorry, what alphabet are Spanish and Portuguese written in?

I&#x27;m pretty sure this extends beyond ChatGPT.<p>The other day I meme-ified a photo with ChatGPT. Pleased with the style I fed that into Midjourney&#x27;s &quot;Describe&quot; feature which aims to write an image generation prompt based on the image supplied. Midjourney did include a location as part of its output description and this was indeed accurate to the original photographic source material - this is all in spite of the image fed into the system being a ChatGPT-generated caricature, with what I thought was a generic looking background.<p>The lesson here is that these are still algorithmically generated images - and although it may not be obvious to us, even heavily stylised images may still give away a location through the inclusion of unremarkable landmarks. In my case it appears that the particular arrangement of mountains in the background was specific to a single geographic region.

As always when there&#x27;s a new trend it refuses me.<p>I showed it a picture of a street in Rome from our last holiday and the thinking traces show it was bang on but halfway through the output it just deletes it all and says it&#x27;s against policy.

Worked so-so for me. Took a picture from my street, and cropped it a bit to leave out some significant landmark in the distance. It missed by around 500 km, but deduced a lot of things correctly.<p>Then I used the uncropped picture, and it spent 3 minutes trying to look at the features of said landmark. It get hung up on some similar (and much more famous) island which is even further away from here.<p>Lastly I used a google image photo of said landmark (which is an island with a lighthouse) - which was quite clear. But it insisted on being the same island as the previous try.

&quot;New privacy risk&quot; what the hell.<p>The whole internet is a privacy risk from the start. Don&#x27;t want any risk? Don&#x27;t publish anything. Go live on an island. Be a random.<p>I&#x27;m fond of boosting privacy issue awareness, but jumping directly to &quot;booh new privacy risk&quot; every time is insane.

Earlier on HN:<p>ChatGPT now performs well at GeoGuesser (flausch.social)<p>131 points | 8 hours ago | 113 comments <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43723408">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43723408</a>

I took a crapshot at asking chatgpt how I&#x27;d set the clock on my car radio by giving it a picture. Not only did it tell me the correct method, but it identified my radio as a &quot;typical factory radio installed in early 2000 <i>insert make here</i> vehicles.&quot;

I just played a full round of Geoguessr world with Gemini 2.5 and got a score of 22k &#x2F; 25k (so a silver medal). This puts in the realm of a &quot;pretty good&quot; player.<p>It was shockingly accurate with its guesses of Essen, Germany and Sheffield, UK, but faltered a bit in Italy (it thought Genoa was Siena) and Russia (it guessed Samara but it was actually a small town about 400 miles to the west). It also guessed Orlando when it was Tampa.<p>Still this was only giving it a single image to work off of, where any player would be able to move around for a few minutes.

A photo taken on my street (no exif) &quot;only&quot; gives the correct town in chatgpt and gemini, and then incorrectly guesses the precise neighbourhood&#x2F;street when pushed. Gemini claimed to have done a reverse image search, but I&#x27;m not convinced it did. An actual Google reverse image search found similar photos, taken a bit further along the same street or in a different direction, labelled with the correct street (no LLM required).

Hmmm this could be really problematic tbh.<p>The version of using reasoning to do geoguesser to find approximate locations is fine. But we should fully expect this tech to reasonably soon be able to rapidly vector search satellite imagery or even non satellite imagery to pinpoint locations based on landmarks that should feel unusable to us humans.<p>We’re going to create a fuzzy visual index for every location in the world.

I&#x27;ve been digitising family photos using this. I scanned the photo itself and the text on it, then passed that to an LLM for OCR and used tools to get the caption verbatim, the location mentioned and the date in a standard format. That was going to be the end of it, but the OpenAI docs <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;platform.openai.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;function-calling?lang=curl&amp;strict-mode=enabled&amp;api-mode=chat#sample-function" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;platform.openai.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;function-calling?lan...</a> suggest letting the model guess coordinates instead of just grabbing names, so I did both and it was impressive. My favourite was taking a picture looking out to sea from a pier and pinpointing the exact pier.

I gave it this picture <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;HyfVxiD.jpeg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;HyfVxiD.jpeg</a><p>At first, it&#x27;s unsure, but also mention that there are a lot of riverside cafes in Southeast Asia that have this view. Then I said it was in Vietnam, and it was immediately concluded that this was taken at the Han River in Da Nang city, which was correct.<p>I can see that there is some actual analysis skill here. I&#x27;m not 100% convinced, but I&#x27;m still impressed.

I tried just now. It got one image exactly and proposed reasonably good but wrong guesses for the other two.<p>Makes me appreciate the insane level of skill that humans on GeoGuessr style subreddits have.

I’ve found it surprisingly good, but has anyone verified that it’s not just using EXIF geolocation data embedded in the photo? I haven’t bothered to strip it.<p>Edit: just saw defrost’s link to the earlier threads, and one comment did just that <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43724063">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43724063</a>

Its pretty good I had used 4o many months back with a picture of me deccades back in nalanda, and mind you not the iconic huge wall that most people associate with it, but another corner of the place and it knew where I was back then.

Not to rain on anyone&#x27;s parade. This does seem fun, but I have been doing this with Google Lens or Gemini on my phone for a while now and it&#x27;s usually pretty good already?<p>I mean a while like Google Lens has been able to do this for a long time...

Working backwards -- it seems like a good idea to use geoguessr in the training set for SFT or sorts. I would imagine it would generalise well to other aspects.

With a sample size of 1, Gemini 2.5 Pro (Experimental) did a great job of this (and was considerably faster than O3)

People taking pictures with you in them without your permission, whether intentional or not, are invading your privacy.