You Can Use AI Chatbots to Quickly Find Things in Photos

As the world grapples with artificial intelligence and where exactly the technology fits in, one Twitter user has demonstrated an extremely handy use for ChatGPT.

Someone who goes by Paula on the platform now known as X claims that her mom had found the book she was looking for in a store by taking a photo of the ‘New Fiction’ section and asking ChatGPT to find the book Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

“The book Atmosphere is located on the top row, toward the right-hand side of the display,” the chatbot replies. Anyone who has spent a long time in a bookstore looking for a specific title will tell you that this is a very helpful aid.

Paula insists that the chatbot was correct, and users praised the app for being a useful AI. “Solving actual problems instead of promising to revolutionize entire industries,” writes Denis Stetskov. Another user said they had used this function, known as computer vision, to find ibuprofen in Japan.

It is similar to ChatGPT’s ability to geolocate photos. PetaPixel tested the model’s capability of finding the location of a photo back in April and found it to be eerily accurate at guessing the coordinates.

Beware of ChatGPT’s Confidence

But much like the photos, ChatGPT will sometimes give the wrong answer with the same confidence as a correct one — also known as a hallucination.

One user asked ChatGPT to find the same book, Atmosphere, on his bookshelf. The catch? He doesn’t have the book.

Another user asked the chatbot to find John Steinbeck’s classic Of Mice and Men and not only gave the wrong answer but also highlighted a random part of the image. “You made that up, didn’t you?” writes the user, to which the AI admitted it had.

“I’ve tried it at the thrift store to look through the CDs,” writes a Reddit user. “It’s gonna hallucinate a good chunk of the time in my experience, although books are maybe more distinguishable compared to CDs on their sides.”

So in conclusion, the computer vision that ChatGPT possesses can be very useful, but it can never be fully trusted.

Finding things isn’t the only use for ChatGPT’s AI image editor: it can also turn people into dogs, turn people into toy figurines, and turn any image into a Studio Ghilbi-style cartoon.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.