AI Chatbots and Geolocation

AI chatbots don’t have the best track record when it comes to accuracy. They appear to struggle with geolocation too, as Bellingcat discovered two years ago in a test of OpenAI and Google chatbots. Bellingcat has now tested them again, this time putting 20 large-language models to work on 25 travel photos to see if things have improved, with Google Lens reverse image search as a control. The result? A few ChatGPT models outperformed Google Lens, but not by much; the rest were worse. Details at the link.

(Update: Bellingcat’s coverage goes in quite a different direction than reports last April highlighting ChatGPT’s “scary” ability to pinpoint locations from photographs, largely because it compares it with existing non-AI reverse image search. Privacy risks may not depend on the kind of technology analyzing the photo, in other words.)

Google Maps Is Adding Generative AI

Uh-oh. Generative AI is coming to Google Maps. Google is using large-language models to give suggestions on where to go based on its vast horde of reviews, ratings and other contributor data. “Starting in the U.S., this early access experiment launches this week to select Local Guides, who are some of the most active and passionate members of the Maps community. Their insights and valuable feedback will help us shape this feature so we can bring it to everyone over time.” Other LLMs have a tendency to push out magnificently wrong answers; it’ll be interesting to see what results Google will get with this specific set of data. (The chances of spectacularity are not zero.)