Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-is-scarily-good-at-guessing-the-location-of-random-photos.html

Wow:

To test PIGEON’s performance, I gave it five personal photos from a trip I took across America years ago, none of which have been published online. Some photos were snapped in cities, but a few were taken in places nowhere near roads or other easily recognizable landmarks.

That didn’t seem to matter much.

It guessed a campsite in Yellowstone to within around 35 miles of the actual location. The program placed another photo, taken on a street in San Francisco, to within a few city blocks.

Not every photo was an easy match: The program mistakenly linked one photo taken on the front range of Wyoming to a spot along the front range of Colorado, more than a hundred miles away. And it guessed that a picture of the Snake River Canyon in Idaho was of the Kawarau Gorge in New Zealand (in fairness, the two landscapes look remarkably similar).

This kind of thing will likely get better. And even if it is not perfect, it has some pretty profound privacy implications (but so did geolocation in the EXIF data that accompanies digital photos).