A scorching potato: Now that individuals have principally stopped utilizing ChatGPT to show themselves into motion figures, it appears the subsequent pattern involving the AI is utilizing it to guess places primarily based on images. Whereas some are discovering this reverse location search performance enjoyable, it raises a number of privateness issues, particularly in the case of doxxing.
OpenAI launched its newest o3 and o4-mini fashions final week, which might “purpose” by means of uploaded photographs. This implies it could crop, rotate, and zoom in on images, even when they’re of poor high quality.
Mixed with the fashions’ different skills, folks have discovered that they’re notably good at figuring out places in uploaded images.
Customers are feeding o3 photographs of all the things from restaurant menus to selfies and telling the mannequin to think about it’s taking part in the web guessing sport GeoGuessr, which duties gamers with guessing places primarily based on Google Road View photographs.
Wow, nailed it and never even a tree in sight. pic.twitter.com/bVcoe1fQ0Z
– swax (@swax) April 17, 2025
It is simple to see this as all enjoyable and video games, however there is a doubtlessly darker aspect. This reverse picture search may simply enable somebody to be doxxed – the general public revealing of the place they stay or are positioned – primarily based on minute particulars in a picture that almost all people wouldn’t discover. A easy selfie with few background objects, or a narrative on social media, might be fed into ChatGPT to study the place it was taken.
Whereas customers have praised the o3 mannequin’s means to determine places from photographs, it is not one thing that arrived with the most recent releases. TechCrunch notes that GPT-4o, which was launched with out picture reasoning, was in a position to give you the identical solutions as o3 most of the time, and it did so in much less time. Nonetheless, there was one occasion within the publication’s testing the place o3 was in a position to accurately guess {that a} image of a purple rhino head mounted in a bar was from a Williamsburg speakeasy – GPT-4o thought it was from a UK pub.
It is necessary to notice that even o3 would not get its guesses proper each time, and typically it will get caught in a loop when attempting to find out a location.
An OpenAI spokesperson stated that visible reasoning will make its instruments extra useful in areas like accessibility, analysis, or figuring out places in emergency response.
As for stopping doxxing, the spokesperson stated the fashions refuse requests for personal or delicate data, and the corporate has added safeguards meant to ban the fashions from figuring out personal people in photographs.
Masthead: Alex Shuper
