Artificial intelligence is changing the game, and ChatGPT’s newest version, running on the Advanced Reasoning model o3, is blowing minds with its ability to figure out where a photo was taken with barely any clues. Yeah, it’s cool, but let’s not ignore the giant elephant in the room—privacy. Or should I say, the lack of it?
Here’s how it works (and why it’s kinda scary): you give ChatGPT a photo, maybe even one that’s had all its metadata scrubbed clean, and ask, ‘Hey, where’s this?’ Then, like some kind of digital Sherlock Holmes, it picks apart the image—looking at stuff like the color of the water, the shade of the sand, or the style of the buildings—to take a wild guess. And sometimes, it’s scarily accurate. Like that time it nailed a beach photo as Praia de Santa Monica in Cape Verde. Spot on. But, and this is a big but, it’s not perfect. Show it a photo of a random bookstore inside, and it’s more likely to scratch its virtual head. Still, the fact that it can zero in on your exact spot in Midtown Manhattan from just any old photo? That’s the kind of party trick that makes you think twice about what you post online.
And it’s not just about playing detective for fun. Imagine employers, cops, or even creeps using this tech to keep tabs on people or check if someone’s really where they say they are. Right now, you’ve gotta be messing around with ChatGPT Plus to use this feature, but let’s be real—AI moves fast. It’s only a matter of time before this kind of thing is everywhere, and way more precise.
So here we are, standing at the crossroads of ‘Wow, that’s amazing!’ and ‘Wait, is that too much power?’ AI’s making leaps and bounds in understanding the world like never before, but at what cost? As we ooh and aah over these tech marvels, we’ve also gotta start talking—seriously—about where we draw the line. Because once this genie’s out of the bottle, good luck putting it back in.
