Viral ChatGPT Trend Uses AI to Reverse-Search Locations from Photos

A new viral trend is making the rounds: people are using ChatGPT to figure out the location shown in images.

This week, OpenAI released its latest AI models—GPT-4o and GPT-4 mini—both of which can uniquely “reason” about uploaded images. In practice, these models can crop, rotate, and zoom in on photos to deeply analyze them—even blurry or distorted ones.

This image analysis ability, combined with the models' web-search capabilities, has turned ChatGPT into a powerful tool for location detection. On the platform X, users quickly discovered that GPT-4o, in particular, is impressively accurate at identifying cities, landmarks, and even specific restaurants and bars using subtle visual clues.

Interestingly, these results are not based on previous ChatGPT conversations or EXIF data (metadata attached to images showing where a photo was taken). Instead, users on X are uploading photos of restaurant menus, neighborhoods, faces, or selfies and asking GPT-4o to “pretend it’s playing GeoGuessr”—the online game where players guess locations based on Google Street View images.

Naturally, this raises privacy concerns. There’s nothing stopping a bad actor from taking a screenshot of someone’s Instagram story and using ChatGPT to pinpoint the location.

Of course, this kind of image-based location detection was technically possible before the launch of GPT-4o and mini. To compare location-guessing performance, users ran multiple images through both GPT-4o and the older GPT-4 model. Surprisingly, GPT-4o delivered the same accurate answers as GPT-4—but faster.

During brief testing, at least one case stood out: GPT-4o successfully identified a Williamsburg pub from a photo of a purple rhino head in a dimly-lit bar—something GPT-4 couldn't do.

That said, GPT-4o isn’t flawless. In several tests, it failed—getting stuck in loops, unable to arrive at a confident answer, or providing completely incorrect guesses. Users on X also noted that GPT-4o can sometimes “overthink” its location guesses.

Still, the trend highlights emerging risks posed by increasingly capable, so-called “reasoning” AI models. ChatGPT appears to have some guardrails in place to prevent reverse location lookup, but OpenAI has not specifically addressed this issue in its safety reports for GPT-4o or mini.

We’ve reached out to OpenAI for comment and will update this story if they respond.