There’s a considerably regarding new development going viral: People are utilizing ChatGPT to determine the situation proven in footage.
This week, OpenAI launched its latest AI fashions, o3 and o4-mini, each of which might uniquely “purpose” via uploaded photos. In apply, the fashions can crop, rotate, and zoom in on pictures — even blurry and distorted ones — to completely analyze them.
These image-analyzing capabilities, paired with the fashions’ potential to go looking the online, make for a potent location-finding instrument. Users on X shortly found that o3, particularly, is kind 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 many circumstances, the fashions don’t look like drawing on “reminiscences” of previous ChatGPT conversations, or EXIF knowledge, which is the metadata connected to pictures that reveal particulars reminiscent of 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,” a web-based sport that challenges gamers to guess areas from Google Street View photos.
this can be a enjoyable ChatGPT o3 function. 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 present 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
Of course, this may very well be carried out even earlier than the launch of o3 and o4-mini. TechCrunch ran a variety of pictures via o3 and an older mannequin with out image-reasoning capabilities, GPT-4o, to check the fashions’ location-guessing expertise. Surprisingly, GPT-4o arrived on the identical, right reply as o3 most of the time — and took much less time.
There was a minimum of 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. Several of our exams failed — o3 acquired caught in a loop, unable to reach at a solution it was fairly assured about, or volunteered a unsuitable location. Users on X famous, too, that o3 may be fairly far off in its location deductions.
But the development illustrates a few of the rising dangers offered by extra succesful, so-called reasoning AI fashions. There look 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 security 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.
