Trevor Rainbolt, geo-guessing champion and community’s poster child who found internet stardom thanks to this meme below, might soon find his unique talent under threat from artificial intelligence (AI).
From who? Daniel Heinen, the founder of an AI source gathering solutions platform called Greylark.io, claims he has developed a “geospatial vision LLM” to predict a person’s location within 30 kilometres. The AI supposedly accomplishes this by just looking at a single image.
The AI tool, ‘GeoSpy AI’, analyses an image’s surroundings down to every sidewalk and inch of soil and guesses where the photo was taken. Impressive? Creepy? Would you rather a human geo-guessing enthusiast find you or an AI? We’ll let you decide.
Geoguessr AI
I tested out GeoSpy AI myself to see if the AI was really accurate. Once we headed over to Geospy AI’s website, all we had to do was upload one photo.
The first photo I uploaded was an old photo of me squatting amongst a flock of ducks by a pond. The photo was taken in a town called Bendigo in regional Victoria, which is a two-hour drive from Melbourne. GeoSpy AI wrongly guessed that it was taken in Adelaide, South Australia.
I decided to test the AI a second time. The second photo I uploaded was a photo of my legs on top of a rock by the sea. The photo was taken on a warm sunny day at Cinque Terre, Italy, in 2018 before COVID.
This time, GeoSpy AI correctly guessed the location; it even provided the exact map coordinates of where I sat. I unfortunately do not remember the coordinates of where I sat, so let’s assume that GeoSpy was right.
Guessing your location with AI
On X, GeoSpy AI went viral after Heinen’s friend, Andrew Gao, shared the tool on his social media account. Other fascinated users started replying under Gao’s tweet with their personal photos asking GeoSpy AI to guess where they’re taken.
Geospy AI correctly guessed all of them, from a church atop a hill in Slovenia to a gazebo in Singapore.
Head to the GeoSpy website if you want to have a go yourself.
