Why is it dystopian? It's a nice utility.
The tool is just intelligence. Intelligence itself is not dystopian or utopian. It's what you use it for that makes it so.
The tool is just intelligence. Intelligence itself is not dystopian or utopian. It's what you use it for that makes it so.
[0] Which is probably one reason why the discourse grates some. Privilege still sounds to me like it's something exclusive, like a 0.1%er thing. Naming stuff is hard.
The majority of people clutching pearls over the “privacy” implications of photo geolocation are at least as privileged as me, and have even less concept of what e.g. stalking victims go through than I do.
It’s just “think of the children” all over again; “I am uncomfortable with random people knowing my general vicinity” sounds weird, and “I am deeply concerned for the vulnerable people this could harm” sounds noble.
The reality is that those with serious privacy concerns aren’t posting random photos to the internet. I mean, jesus, there’s EXIF data. Hand wringing over AI is entirely performative here.
It's even easier to unintentionally include identifying information when intentionally making a post, whether by failing to catch it when submitting, or by including additional images in your online posting.
There are also wholesale uploads people may make automatically, e.g., when backing up content or transferring data between systems. That may end up unsecured or in someone else's hands.
Even very obscure elements may identify a very specific location. There's a story of how a woman's location was identified by the interior of her hotel room, I believe by the doorknobs. An art piece placed in a remote Utah location was geolocated based on elements of the geology, sun angle, and the like, within a few hours. The art piece is discussed in this NPR piece: <https://www.npr.org/2020/11/28/939629355/unraveling-the-myst...> (2020).
Geoguessing of its location: <https://web.archive.org/web/20201130222850/https://www.reddi...>
Wikipedia article: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_monolith>
These are questions which barely deserve answering, let alone asking, in this day and age.
It is dystopian.
Some things are just tools that will be used for both good and bad.
If you don't want to post a photo, then don't post a photo.
Other people have posted photos of me without my consent, how am i meant to stop that?
If i posted photos 20 years ago when i was a dumb teenager i cant undo that, either
But this here? This is just drama over nothing.
In general i have a strong need for privacy. Not having privacy is generally unsettling, in the same way that i close the door when using a toilet or having a shower. I am disturbed by people that don't seem to have an understanding of that concept.
It's terrifying that people exist that have no problem making the world a shittier place and hiding behind a cover of "well it's not the technology that's evil but the people abusing it" as if each tool given to bad actors doesn't make their job easier and easier to do.
Seriously, what's the utility of developing and making something like this public use?
An interesting question for me here is if these models were deliberately trained to enable this capability, or if it's a side-effect of their vision abilities in general.
If you train a general purpose vision-LLM to have knowledge of architecture, vegetation, weather conditions, road signs, street furniture etc... it's going to be able to predict locations from photos.
You could try and stop it - have a system prompt that says "if someone asks you where the photo was taken don't do that" - but experience shows those kind of restrictions are mostly for show, they usually tend to fall over the moment someone adversarial figures out a way to subvert them.
It's not a large leap of logic for anyone in touch with reality to realize that if a general purpose vision AI is going to be able to predict photo locations bad actors are going to use it for that and a lot of them will be people that would otherwise not have had the technological knowhow of accomplishing it themselves.
I know I probably come off more than a little bit insufferable about this but I'm tired of seeing novelty inventions pop up, everyone has fun for a little bit geeking out over them then they're mostly forgotten outside of niche applications until they show up back in the news when they've been used for the latest sextortion/blackmail/catfishing/whatever scam.