Comment by brookst
2 days ago
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.
That's because you haven't lived in an authoritarian regime. NKVD, STASI, Gestapo, would all have killed for such capabilities.
As an east european who grew up and lived in such a regime, I would like to respectfully remind all westerners their care-free and free lives is a privilege the majority of the world doesn't have.
Not to get political, but it deeply irks me to see some American far-leftists glamorize and glorify the Soviet regime and even modern regimes like North Korea's. Especially when certain popular streamers do it. Obviously seeing far-right American internet personalities glorify the Nazi regime is also awful, but the former is often normalized and not considered ostracization-worthy while the latter (rightfully) is.
it's pretty easy to understand: american left are essentially rebellious teens who never grew up. contrarian by nature.
No, you misunderstand me.
Look at all the people in this thread talking about how people are fantastic at guessing locations from photos. This is not a new thing.
"If you want something to be secret don't post it online" is a principle that far predates LLMs. It's still true. It always was. The idea that authoritarian regimes had no way to place the location of photos before this is laughable.
Scale, quality and the reliability make a difference.
There are, and always will be, _few_ humans with the talent and knowledge for geo guessing, their attention and time scarce and precious resources. Enter LLMs, which can process images at scale.
Someone might observe strict OPSEC when it comes with their presence online. But would their cousins do the same? Their elderly parents? Their friends? How about the myriad CCTV camera in the public spaces? Photos aside, no one can live off the grid in this age; our electronic reflection grows sharper, more focused every day. And so we generate data and LLMs can compile that data at scale, reliable and fast.
As a small aside: "The idea that authoritarian regimes had no way to place the location of photos before" it's not an argument I made or implied.
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.
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.
The supposed existence of your friend doesn't dictate policy, much less reality. It's already been explained to you that GeoGuessr exists and is very popular. What o3 can do, so can a million humans out there.
You are trying to manufacture outrage. Plain and simple.
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?
Honestly, yes it's a bit dystopian that a forum online exists where anyone can post a photo and experts from all around the world will help them figure out the exact location of that photo.
Lots of things that exist in our world today are mildly dystopian.
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It certainly could be, but not all technological advancement is necessarily dystopian. You say, currently everyone now has access to this, while before it was only available to nation states who could hire teams of skilled analyst s. I mean, I agree it's scary that now a stalker could track a victim, but cars and cameras probably help as well. So, I think it's fair to challenge "dystopian", someone will use it for non-nefarious purposes.
I think the point that is getting missed in a lot of the comments is the act of witnessing it go through it's analysis. You have a little live view into what it's thinking and watching it zoom in to various bits of the image and 'reason' about them is kind of...interesting.
Think: "stalker".
If the person is already a stalker you'd think they'd already know this, no? There's that anecdotal stuff in japan where a vlogger was located by her "fans" from a reflexion of their home bus station or something. The weird people will do weird stuff regardless of technology, IMO.
And the governments are already doing this for decades at least, so ... I think the tech could be a net benefit, as with many other technologies that have matured.
> weird people will do weird stuff regardless of technology
If I were someone's only stalker, I'd be absolutely hopeless at finding their location from images. I'm really bad at it if I don't know the location first hand
But now, suddenly with AI I'm close to an expert. The accessibility of just uploading an image to ChatGPT means everyone has an easy way of abusing it, not just a small percentage of the population
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