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A hot potato: Now that people have mostly stopped using ChatGPT to turn themselves into action figures, it seems the next trend involving the AI is using it to guess locations based on photos. While some are finding this reverse location search functionality fun, it raises several privacy concerns, especially when it comes to doxxing.
OpenAI released its latest o3 and o4-mini models last week, which can “reason” through uploaded images. This means it can crop, rotate, and zoom in on photos, even if they’re of poor quality.
Combined with the models’ other abilities, people have found that they are particularly good at identifying locations in uploaded photos.
Users are feeding o3 images of everything from restaurant menus to selfies and telling the model to imagine it is playing the online guessing game GeoGuessr, which tasks players with guessing locations based on Google Street View images.
Wow, nailed it and not even a tree in sight. pic.twitter.com/bVcoe1fQ0Z
– swax (@swax) April 17, 2025
It’s easy to see this as all fun and games, but there’s a potentially darker side. This reverse image search could easily allow someone to be doxxed – the public revealing of where they live or are located – based on minute details in an image that most humans would not notice. A simple selfie with few background items, or a story on social media, could be fed into ChatGPT to learn where it was taken.
While users have praised the o3 model’s ability to identify locations from images, it isn’t something that arrived with the latest releases. TechCrunch notes that GPT-4o, which was released without image reasoning, was able to come up with the same answers as o3 more often than not, and it did so in less time. However, there was one instance in the publication’s testing where o3 was able to correctly guess that a picture of a purple rhino head mounted in a bar was from a Williamsburg speakeasy – GPT-4o thought it was from a UK pub.
It’s important to note that even o3 doesn’t get its guesses right every time, and sometimes it gets stuck in a loop when trying to determine a location.
An OpenAI spokesperson said that visual reasoning will make its tools more helpful in areas like accessibility, research, or identifying locations in emergency response.
As for preventing doxxing, the spokesperson said the models refuse requests for private or sensitive information, and the company has added safeguards intended to prohibit the models from identifying private individuals in images.
Masthead: Alex Shuper
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