404 Media has obtained a cache of internal police emails showing at least two agencies have bought access to GeoSpy, an AI tool that analyzes architecture, soil, and other features to near instantly geolocate photos.
It’s not hard. I once saw a random “what is this thing” photo from a bad angle. But it included a store in the background. Only two stores in North America with that name, though Google map search tried to be helpful and return a bunch of other results. Easy enough to check both.
Even with the extra street view angles I couldn’t figure out what the thing was though :(
It’s one of those tasks where it has a bunch of little components, each of which is easy to do (like identifying a store, or mineral formation, or road signs, etc) and so it is a thing that you can design machine learning tools around the individual tasks (‘what is this rock?’) and then instead of needing a highly trained human being to take a few minutes/hours to go through all of the details from memory, you can just push thousands of pictures through an AI system and get ‘good enough’ results.
It seems like there is a company selling such a ‘good enough’ service.
It’s not hard. I once saw a random “what is this thing” photo from a bad angle. But it included a store in the background. Only two stores in North America with that name, though Google map search tried to be helpful and return a bunch of other results. Easy enough to check both.
Even with the extra street view angles I couldn’t figure out what the thing was though :(
It’s one of those tasks where it has a bunch of little components, each of which is easy to do (like identifying a store, or mineral formation, or road signs, etc) and so it is a thing that you can design machine learning tools around the individual tasks (‘what is this rock?’) and then instead of needing a highly trained human being to take a few minutes/hours to go through all of the details from memory, you can just push thousands of pictures through an AI system and get ‘good enough’ results.
It seems like there is a company selling such a ‘good enough’ service.