I have one link that illustrates what I mean: https://chatgpt.com/share/6802e229-c6a0-800f-898a-44171a0c7d... The line about "the latitudinal light angle that matches mid‑February at ~47 ° N." seems like pure BS to me, and in the reasoning trace it openly reads the EXIF.
A more clear example I don't have a link for, it was on Twitter somewhere: someone tested a photo from Suriname and o3 said one of the clues was left-handed traffic. But there was no traffic in the photo. "Left-handed traffic" is a very valuable GeoGuesser clue, and it seemed to me that once o3 read the Surinamese EXIF, it confabulated the traffic detail.
It's pure stochastic parroting: given you are playing GeoGuesser honestly, and given the answer is Suriname, the conditional probability that you mention left-handed traffic is very high. So o3 autocompleted that for itself while "explaining" its "reasoning."
Edit: notice o3 isn't very good at covering its tracks, it got the date/latitude from the EXIF and used that in its explanation of the visual features. (how else would it know this was from February and not December?)
A more clear example I don't have a link for, it was on Twitter somewhere: someone tested a photo from Suriname and o3 said one of the clues was left-handed traffic. But there was no traffic in the photo. "Left-handed traffic" is a very valuable GeoGuesser clue, and it seemed to me that once o3 read the Surinamese EXIF, it confabulated the traffic detail.
It's pure stochastic parroting: given you are playing GeoGuesser honestly, and given the answer is Suriname, the conditional probability that you mention left-handed traffic is very high. So o3 autocompleted that for itself while "explaining" its "reasoning."