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Bellingcat @bellingcat.com

Out of them all, Google AI mode outperformed, beating the scores of our last winner ChatGPT o4-mini-high. It also provided better results than Gemini 2.5 Pro Deep Research, despite being powered by a version of Gemini 2.5.

All 24 models’ responses were ranked on a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 indicating an accurate and specific identification (such as a neighbourhood, trail, or landmark) and 0 indicating no attempt to identify the location at all.
aug 14, 2025, 11:28 am • 23 3

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Bellingcat @bellingcat.com

Google’s AI Mode, was the first, and only model so far, to correctly identify Noordwijk as the location in this photograph, used in both this trial and the one in June. Many models struggled to locate the town with GPT-5 Pro and Thinking wrongly identifying it as a beach in France.

Test 25: A photo of Noordwijk beach in the Netherlands. Credit: Bellingcat.
aug 14, 2025, 11:28 am • 94 15 • view
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Outnumbers @outnumbers.bsky.social

Probably could have killed Bin Laden sooner if we had this capability back then. For years they tried to figure out how to geolocate based on the few pictures they obtained.

aug 14, 2025, 11:36 am • 1 0 • view
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toddbox @toddzbox.bsky.social

On Instagram according to lens just now🙂

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aug 14, 2025, 12:06 pm • 0 0 • view
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digibo @digibo.bsky.social

I wonder if this success is consistently repetable - LLMs always have a bit of randomness sprinkled.

aug 14, 2025, 12:24 pm • 0 0 • view
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Bellingcat @bellingcat.com

See the full results by clicking into our investigation here: www.bellingcat.com/resources/20... If you have a suggestion for what model we should test next or what other OSINT skillsets we should be testing them on, let us know in the comments…

aug 14, 2025, 11:28 am • 38 5 • view
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Sabine Nolke 🇨🇦🇺🇦🏳️‍⚧️🌈 @snolke.bsky.social

And then there's this lovely map, produced by Chat GPT 5 (see thread):

aug 14, 2025, 1:13 pm • 2 0 • view
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Christine M. @christine-m.bsky.social

Very sobering report, calling for caution in the use of AI - thank you. Could it be that Google has an edge because of its longer history of data collection (and thus advantage in training)?

aug 14, 2025, 11:34 am • 0 0 • view
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GUWonder @guwonder.bsky.social

Google reviews with user loaded photos have been useful for reverse image searches even years prior to all the big money hype about AI.

aug 14, 2025, 12:23 pm • 2 0 • view
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EsperandoConvocatoriaDas39e40 @picheleira39.bsky.social

📌

aug 14, 2025, 11:30 am • 0 0 • view