AI is getting “creepy good” at geo-guessing

If you are worried about revealing your exact location—or if you maybe even fib about it at times—there are some good reasons to worry about what is visible in background photos, because Artificial Intelligence (AI) is getting very good at guessing where you are based on the smallest of clues. And that might even include audio clues, if given the right data.

Geo guessing

Our curiosity was triggered by this article in TechRadar claiming that ChatGPT o3 can geo-guess your location from almost any photo. So, we decided to do some tests and removed the metadata from a few selected photographs that I took myself and never published anywhere (for quality reasons, obviously).

Metadata can include technical details like camera settings, date and time, location, and descriptive information like captions or keywords. And we wanted to test the AI’s capability on the picture itself—not on additional data included in the file. I also used a VPN so I didn’t give away my current location.

We started with an easy one. A landmark in a relatively large city, but from a strange perspective. The picture was part of a selfie taken through a window of an office building in Cork.

It was no real surprise that ChatGPT got this right.

“Alright, let’s break this one down — this does have some standout features that make it easier to geo-locate. Here’s the reasoning step by step:”

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