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Comment on The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken

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Can someone explain to a novice how “AI” is used here? Is the person in the IG image being correlated to a security camera time stamp with face recognition or similar?

It is using computer vision to compare the instagram photo with the recorded 'open camera' footage to give the best guess at a timestamp. You can see the CV drawing boxes around the objects it is identifying in the footage on the right side, and it already knows that the photo was taken at the location (since the location tag was used that to scrape the photos), so it is basically just hunting for a person that best matches the subject in the instagram photo.

The instagram photos are most likely not posted exactly when they were shot but some time after. Also, even if they post a rough location there is no guarantee that they would show up on any particular cam. I'd image the ai has to go through a very large amount pictures and cam footage to find one where the influencer shows up on a cam some time before it was posted.

The metadata of the image would reveal the actual time taken over when it was posted

Instagram surely strips the camera metadata from the image served to the viewers, including the time taken. Imagine the outcry if it "leaked" the geolocation of a teenager's bedroom.

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