Dangerous: ChatGPT knows where you live – just a photo is enough

After the phase when people massively used ChatGPT to create action figures from their photos passed, the new entertainment on the internet seems to be all about – location tracking.

At first glance, it looks like a game – users upload photos of restaurant menus, selfies or street views, and ChatGPT tries to figure out where the photo was taken. Some even “turn” ChatGPT into a player of GeoGuessr, a popular online game where you have to guess the location based on images from Google Street View.

This may sound harmless, but it also has a serious “dark side.” OpenAI recently released its new o3 and o4-mini models, which have advanced “visual reasoning” capabilities. This means the AI ​​can zoom, rotate, crop, and analyze even blurry images to extract useful information. When these capabilities are combined with the model’s other capabilities – the result is an incredible ability to identify locations, reports Tech Spot.

The geoguessing power of o3 is a really good sample of its agentic abilities. Between its smart guessing and its ability to zoom into images, to do web searches, and read text, the results can be very freaky.

I stripped location info from the photo & prompted "geoguess this" pic.twitter.com/KaQiXHUvYL

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) April 17, 2025

Translation: All it takes is a simple Instagram photo, and AI can tell which city you're in, which neighborhood — even your exact address. This opens the door to serious risks like doxxing, the disclosure of someone's location or identity without their consent.

In one test, the o3 model was able to tell that a photo of a purple rhino head in a bar was taken at a bar in Williamsburg, New York, while GPT-4o mistakenly thought it was a British pub. However, while o3 is more accurate in some cases, it is not infallible – it sometimes gets stuck trying to determine the location.

OpenAI says these capabilities could help in areas ranging from accessibility for people with disabilities and scientific research to emergency response. They also claim that the models refuse requests for private or sensitive information and that safeguards are in place against identifying private individuals in photos.

However, AI's ability to guess a location from a photo based on small details (signs, interiors, scenery) still remains potentially dangerous, especially in the hands of those who want to harm someone. /Telegraph/