‘How A.I. Helped Locate a Viral Video’s True Origin’ Was by Ignoring A.I. ⇥ fullfact.org

This story of how Full Fact geolocated a viral video claiming to be shot in London is intriguing because it disproves its own headline’s claim that “A.I. helped”.

Charlotte Green, Full Fact:

But in this case, directly reverse image searching through Google took me to a TikTok video with a location marker for ‘Pondok Pesantren Al Fatah Temboro’, in Indonesia.

This is enough information to give the Full Fact team a great start: translated, it is a school in Temboro.

Green:

We found a slightly different compilation of similar videos on Facebook, seemingly from the same area, also with women in Islamic dress, but with more geographical features visible, such as a sign and clearer views of buildings.

Using stills from this video as references, we asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT if it could provide coordinates to the location, using the possible location of the Al Fatah school in Indonesia.

Up to the point where ChatGPT was invoked, there is no indication any A.I. tools were used. After that — and I do not intend to be mean — it is unclear to me why anyone would ask ChatGPT for coordinates to a known, named location when you can just search Google Maps. It is the third one down in my searches; the first two would quickly be eliminated when comparing to either video.

Green:

But this did not match the location of the original video we were trying to fact check—or anywhere in the near vicinity. While we were very confident the video had been filmed in Temboro, we needed to investigate further to prove this.

After this, no A.I. tools were used. ChatGPT was only able to do as much as a basic Google Maps search. After that, Full Fact had to do some old-fashioned comparative geolocation, and were ultimately successful.

I found this via Charles Arthur, who writes:

And thus we see the positive uses of geolocation by chatbots.

On the contrary, this proved little about the advantages of A.I. geolocation. These tools can certainly be beneficial; Green links to an experiment in Bellingcat in comparison to Google’s reverse image search tools.

I think Full Fact did great work in geolocating this video and deflating its hateful context in that tweet. But a closer reading of the actual steps taken shows any credit to ChatGPT or A.I. is overblown.