There’s a considerably regarding new development going viral: Individuals are utilizing ChatGPT to determine the placement proven in footage.
This week, OpenAI launched its latest AI fashions, o3 and o4-mini, each of which may uniquely “cause” by way of uploaded photos. In follow, the fashions can crop, rotate, and zoom in on pictures — even blurry and distorted ones — to totally analyze them.
These image-analyzing capabilities, paired with the fashions’ skill to look the online, make for a potent location-finding device. Customers on X shortly found that o3, particularly, is sort of good at deducing cities, landmarks, and even eating places and bars from delicate visible clues.
Wow, nailed it and never even a tree in sight. pic.twitter.com/bVcoe1fQ0Z
— swax (@swax) April 17, 2025
In lots of instances, the fashions don’t seem like drawing on “reminiscences” of previous ChatGPT conversations, or EXIF data — the metadata hooked up to pictures that reveal particulars corresponding to the place the photograph was taken.
X is full of examples of customers giving ChatGPT restaurant menus, neighborhood snaps, facades, and self-portraits, and instructing o3 to think about it’s taking part in “GeoGuessr,” an internet recreation that challenges gamers to guess areas from Google Road View photos.
it is a enjoyable ChatGPT o3 characteristic. geoguessr! pic.twitter.com/HrcMIxS8yD
— Jason Barnes (@vyrotek) April 17, 2025
It’s an apparent potential privateness subject. There’s nothing stopping a foul actor from screenshotting, say, an individual’s Instagram Story and utilizing ChatGPT to attempt to doxx them.
o3 is insane
I requested a pal of mine to offer me a random photograph
They gave me a random photograph they took in a library
o3 is aware of it in 20 seconds and it’s proper pic.twitter.com/0K8dXiFKOY— Yumi (@izyuuumi) April 17, 2025
After all, this might be finished even earlier than the launch of o3 and o4-mini. TechCrunch ran a lot of pictures by way of o3 and an older mannequin with out image-reasoning capabilities, GPT-4o, to match the fashions’ location-guessing expertise. Surprisingly, GPT-4o arrived on the identical, appropriate reply as o3 most of the time — and took much less time.
There was not less than one occasion throughout our temporary testing when o3 discovered a spot GPT-4o couldn’t. Given an image of a purple, mounted rhino head in a dimly-lit bar, o3 appropriately answered that it was from a Williamsburg speakeasy — not, as GPT-4o guessed, a U.Okay. pub.
That’s to not recommend o3 is flawless on this regard. A number of of our assessments failed — o3 acquired caught in a loop, unable to reach at a solution it was fairly assured about, or volunteered a mistaken location. Customers on X famous, too, that o3 may be pretty far off in its location deductions.
However the development illustrates a few of the rising dangers offered by extra succesful, so-called reasoning AI fashions. There seem like few safeguards in place to stop this kind of “reverse location lookup” in ChatGPT, and OpenAI, the corporate behind ChatGPT, doesn’t deal with the difficulty in its safety report for o3 and o4-mini.
We’ve reached out to OpenAI for remark. We’ll replace our piece in the event that they reply.
