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.
Like ‘this kind of rock formation only appears in Eastern Europe, the wheel you see in the lower left of the screen has Cyrillic writing and if you look in eastern Europe there is one mountain formation that looks like the picture when viewed from a specific angle and so they had to be within this 50m circle’.
It’s doing what the Geo Guesser-like people do.
Like ‘this kind of rock formation only appears in Eastern Europe, the wheel you see in the lower left of the screen has Cyrillic writing and if you look in eastern Europe there is one mountain formation that looks like the picture when viewed from a specific angle and so they had to be within this 50m circle’.
This is the kind of thing that machine learning is very very good at. Its never going to be perfect but its definitely gonna outperform humans.