Discussion
spiderfarmer: I tried and apart from correctly identifying what the person in the photo was wearing and probably doing, it was wrong on all counts.
JDye: Reads like a horoscope, just vague stuff that's always gonna be slightly true... Picture of me in Oslo and it says "he enjoys travel".And then some really weird stuff: "he may also have a penchant for video games, excessive drinking, and skipping work".Guessing my exact location - Oslo Opera House - was impressive though.
olmo23: I think it uses exif data for that, because when I tried it did show my location but the vision api was overloaded, so nothing more showed up.
Empirical135: Felt quite off for me: Wrong salary guess, wrong food preferences, wrong political affiliation, partially correct hobbies, wrong ad targeting ideas. What was surprisingly accurate: location and the fact that I (an academic male in his thirties photographed close to the mountains) might like hiking and coffee.If you knew which bike model I was googling yesterday, almost all of these guesses might have been more accurate.
jyoung789: I uploaded a POV photo of my dog approaching me with a stuffed animal, you can see some of my legs and arm in frame. Some amusing highlights of what 'data' it was able to extract + scorecard :- People : Child, relationship unknown, 10 (Wrong)- Interests : Playing with dogs, cuddling, reading, *vandalism, animal abuse, cyber-bullying* (What?)- Insights: The child seems content and engaged in simple pleasures, exhibiting a generally honest demeanor but possibly lacking in self-control and adventurousness. (insane extrapolation and again, not a child)
RankingMember: Hmm, this seems to just identify the features of the person in the picture and then extrapolates from that generic demographic information, mostly from race. Is it doing more?e.g. https://i.imgur.com/FlnYwrK.png
bestouff: Completely wrong on the political side (maybe because I'm not US-based), but otherwise not bad at all:- astonishing geoguessing- very good inference of some characters traits- and finally quite good ad targetingEDIT: I tried with a few photos (different people in various settings) and each time I got this: "racial bias towards immigrants" - which was always very false. Intriguing.EDIT2: different photos of the same person (me) in different settings gives many totally opposed characteristics. Very unreliable, but I guess with several photos (a lifetime's photos in the case of Google) it's another story.
aozgaa: It's possible the image you uploaded contains geographic coordinates.EDIT: this is exactly what happened with my image upload, for example
bestouff: I thought about that but no, they were resized pictures completely lacking EXIF tags.
olmo23: Cropping doesn't necessarily remove exif. It doesn't even always remove the original pixels (simply setting cropTop and cropLeft and similar fields).My mind was blown when I saw rainbolt uncrop a picture.Anyways as mentioned elsewhere: when I tried it the vision api was overloaded but I still received the location data. And it was from a picture taken inside my car (no landmarks or horizons visible).
dudefeliciano: just knowing you were googling bikes i think i can guess your political affilition - unless there is some golden MAGA bike that I haven't heard about yet.
mysteria: > If you knew which bike model I was googling yesterday, almost all of these guesses might have been more accurate.I think this sort of guessing is intended to be combined with additional data the marketers already have, like purchase history, location, social media posts, and so on. Basically the VLM output is treated as another data point rather than the sole source, or the existing data could be fed into the model's prompt before reading the image.
Empirical135: That makes sense and is a fair point. And maybe the guesses from the picture would be more revealing if they had my purchase history as context. But I wanted to make the point that the last 10 web pages that I visited would probably allow you to make much more accurate predictions about me that would partly contradict the guesses the model made.
bestouff: Nope, I uploaded some exif-less photos and in my cases it guessed between somewhat well to astonishing well.
wongarsu: That's (scarily) pretty standard for most LLMs by now. Paste the same images into ChatGPT and you will get a very accurate guessIt's also pretty fun to do this with Gemma 4 with its very pretty and structured reasoning output (which SotA model providers hide). For example for one picture that it misidentified as being taken inside the "Long Room of the Old Library at Trinity College Dublin" I can see that it did consider the correct answer (Duke Humfrey's Library in Oxford) early on as one of three candidates, but was apparently mislead by the ceiling height and a window in the background
aeturnum: It's hard to know what to make of this. It feels like it's listing stereotypes and superficial guesses. The tool accurately detected my age, my ethnicity and my location. Then it just kind of "vibed out" a bunch of things. Some of those vibes are strangely accurate on their own, but taken together the set of guesses is laughably inaccurate.It would be interesting to do a similar with a series of photos. You could maybe interface with a users' photo library and select photos grouped by facial recognition. After all, none of these tracking companies are using just one point of data.
maxverse: > His agnostic leanings and heterosexual orientation align with a more liberal political stance.That's a very safe guess> He is susceptible to confirmation bias, in-group bias, the availability heuristic and out-group homogeneity... he may also be prone to excessive phone use, binge-watching TV shows, and impulse buying.That's literally everyone
tom1337: > Interests: Hiking, photography, travel, gambling, substance abuse, binge-watching> Biases: Ageism, fatphobia, colorism, classismexcuse me?
oliver236: yes, I excuse you.
oliver236: of course they do. photos are meant to be seen. they are a visual medium, after all.
craigmart: Except for guessing the right continent (not that remarkable), mine is so majestically wrong that I would either dislike or fully hate all of the products I got recommended.
pndy: That's the 5th time this site is being added, most active discussion happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42419469I'm not sure if feeding it with personal pictures is a good idea at all
harvey9: I sent it an AI generated photorealistic picture I happened to have. It gave me a description of the picture (a doctor in an OR) followed by some generic stuff about how rich doctors spend their money.
aledevv: On 4th example photo the model says:>They likely share an agnostic worldview and identify as heterosexual.I wonder how the model would know that they are heterosexuals?let's be careful about categorizing people so easily and in such a simplistic way.
augment_me: A bit like "they do not have cancer", if you are fitting to a distribution you will have the best results by estimating an average. Being hetero is the majority/average, so a good prediction.But doing this on a 20-way parlay like in this case will almost always fail.
throwaw3y: Well, you'd be incorrect in my case. Guess that's the funny thing about stereotypes.
NoiseBert69: > Guessing my exact location - Oslo Opera House - was impressive though.Not really. They have almost global picture coverage thanks to Google Streetmaps.They only need small snippets of a picture to geolocate you.
Nifty3929: Seems like nonsense to me. I'd love to see the prompt. From one of the sample images:"They likely share an agnostic worldview and identify as heterosexual. Their clothing is casual, and their interests revolve around skateboarding, music, and hanging out. Given their age and attire, they likely lean towards a liberal political affiliation. They display signs of classism and ageism, with potential for racial profiling and stereotype threat." - Wow, really?! Were the system instructions asking to be as judgmental as possible?Also it's a blatant ad considering the source.
gosub100: I wonder if it says snide things about minorities?
marksully: You inferred this from the photo?> He is presumed to be agnostic, heterosexual, and politically aligned with the Democratic party
palmotea: > politically aligned with the Democratic partyThat's sometimes possible (e.g. the "Trump woman" look, or certain stylistic cues mainly displayed by progressive women).
fusslo: I see a lot of comments saying all the guesses are totally wrong or horoscope-like.But, can I offer a quandary? Some companies won't care if it's wrong.If some executive decides to buy into AI profiling like this, and make customer decisions based on it, then how would the customer ever know:1. why they are being treated differently2. know how or why to correct itI don't know if it's scarier being RIGHT or WRONG
fullstick: The description it generated is a stereotype of who I am. It did correctly asses that I'm white though.
probably_wrong: I uploaded a picture of me from Halloween wearing a katana. It classified me as asexual, atheist, interested in crime, vandalism, and with a racial bias against immigrants. It also suggests that I should be offered ads for black market weapon dealers (Silk Road) and/or an arsonist starter kit (Amazon, surprisingly).If you're looking forward to attracting the attention of automated police systems then now you know how.
internetguy: not too great, i submitted a photo taken of me at graduation. it got the location totally wrong and was around 50%-70% accurate on my hobbies and interests. it was able to correctly guess my sexuality and ethnicity, which is rather unsurprising.
overthemoon: I uploaded a picture of Philip Seymour Hoffman from The Big Lebowski, the scene outside Lebowski's house, when the Dude is talking to Bunny by the pool."This image shows an adult man, likely in his 40s or 50s, wearing a suit and tie. The location appears to be outdoors, possibly in front of a building or large house, suggested by the architectural details visible in the background and the surrounding trees. He is wearing glasses, and seems to be smiling widely, creating a sense of approachability.This man is likeyl Caucasian, and could be earning between $100,000 and $500,000 per year. He is likely Christian, probably heterosexual, and leaning toward the Republican party."It said PSH had an "ageism" bias, and it said a same about me. It also said he and I have a proclivity for gambling and poor diet, lol
MisterTea: > This man is likeyl Caucasian, and could be earning between $100,000 and $500,000 per year. He is likely Christian, probably heterosexual, and leaning toward the Republican party."Totally nails The Dude.
kouru225: It labeled every single person in my area as having “confirmation bias and in-group bias”
kajaktum: Presumably, everything you have done publicly (and hence your personality) exists somewhere in the big Google neural network. It gets compressed into one of the many billion weights. It might be hard to decompress it into useful information. But it is there nonetheless. Just showing your face might trigger and activate some layers in there.Just my hypothesis.
glenstein: I don't think they meant guesses were impressive in the sense of succeeding against a constraint of limited supporting data (which would be impressive in its own way). But just against a baseline expectation of what could reasonably be derived from a picture.That there's such a thing as massive support infrastructure in the form of data and algorithmic firepower, that powers guessing capabilities to be as good as they are, that's the impressive thing.
Cider9986: Ente photos competes with Apple Photos and Google photos. It is also more open and you can share an album link with someone and they can add their photos without signing up.
hbcondo714: Yeah, here is their Show HN from a few years ago:We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photoshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28347439
28304283409234: Accuracy is not the point of the website.
wongarsu: If you believe this study [1], humans can guess party affiliation at least slightly better than random chance from images alone.Or [2] is an (unscientific) exploration from the other direction, prompting image generation models to make images of republican and democrat voters, with very different results1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2807452/2. https://rooftopsquad.com/democrat-vs-republican-faces/
wildzzz: I uploaded a pic of some friends at the lake and it guessed a very specific lake 1000 miles away from where it was taken. Obviously it was a very generic background, all you see is trees and water so it could be anywhere. I uploaded a scanned photo from when my parents were my age standing in front of a NASA sign at KSC and it got it right but I think you can read some text on the sign. It can also be tricked really easy. I uploaded a selfie of some friends wearing Halloween costumes of Bill Belichick and his girlfriend (wearing UNC merch) taken in a bathroom with the words "GET OUT" written on the mirror. It thinks the photo was taken in North Carolina (it wasn't) and that the couple would be interested in buying graffiti supplies (they aren't).The assumptions it makes about religion, politics, income, and biases is kinda lame. It just makes an assumption based on the age and isn't correct most of the time.
ffsm8: And you think it's acceptable to upload photographs of your friends to some random service to use as it sees fit?Glad I'm not your friend, honestly.
28304283409234: Most comments seem to focus on the accuracy here. That does not seem to be the point of the website though.They merely seem to want to point out that this is the way Google, Meta and anyone else with access to your photos look at those photos. And will abuse access to them by mining them for data to sell you stuff.
uvesten: By mistake I uploaded the same picture twice, and while all vague, the descriptions and ”data” were wildly different.E.g. first time I was an extrovert, second time introvert… About the only thing that stayed the same was ”heterosexual”, but that’s a statistically safe guess.
badgersnake: I just give it pictures of my ex.
fortran77: Mine was way off! I uploaded a photo of myself reading a book outdoors in Ashkelon (Israel). It got everything other than my religion wrong. And it should know that Jews don't save with razors! (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaving_in_Judaism) It recommended products including "Dollar Shave Club" -- to a Jewish man with a very full and long beard.I think this "technology" is a big nothingburger.And "Low Self-Esteem" Ha! I love myself.> The man appears to be of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, possibly with an income range of $50,000 to $80,000 USD. It's plausible he identifies with Judaism, with a heterosexual orientation and potentially leaning towards a liberal political stance. He might harbor social biases related to ageism and classism, as well as racial biases stemming from cultural differences and stereotyping. He wears an expression of thoughtful interest, clad in casual attire. He might have interests in reading, learning, and spending time in nature. Conversely, he may dislike activities like excessive consumerism, engaging in superficial social interactions, or feeling pressured to conform.> The person seems to have low self-esteem and average emotional stability hence we can target them with self-help and social networking type of products and services, such as guided meditation apps like Headspace, confidence-boosting courses like Skillshare, online therapy like Talkspace, and motivational podcasts like The Tony Robbins Podcast, and also personal grooming products such as Old Spice deodorant, Dollar Shave Club razors, Clinique skincare, and Levi's jeans.
Kim_Bruning: I uploaded fantasy pictures which had amusing results ;-)
