Imagine the scene. You’re in the park with your family, you’re running to catch up with them, and your earbud case falls out of your pocket, scattering your earbuds. You find one but the other has vanished and all you can see is gravel. Who ya gonna call?
For Just-a-fungi893 on Reddit, the answer is: ChatGPT.
“I spent a solid 10 minutes searching, knowing there’s basically no way I’m going to find a tiny white earbud in a sea of white gravel, especially with the sun setting,” they explained. “I use ChatGPT for A LOT of stuff, and it suddenly dawned on me to ask it for help instead of pointlessly scanning the area myself.”
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Five minutes later, earbud and owner were reunited, with ChatGPT steering him towards the exact point in the relevant photo. It’s not because ChatGPT has magic powers, but because LLMs are really good at spotting tiny things in big pictures: earbuds in gravel, needles in haystacks, indicators of tumors in X-rays. It’s all pattern recognition.
It’s time to embrace our AI overlords vs no, it isn’t
As fun as the story is — I’d never have thought of taking a photo and feeding it to a chatbot; it’s smart thinking — one of the other comments on the Reddit thread made me laugh: Mindless-Apricot-236 responded that they once lost a screw outdoors, uploaded a picture to ChatGPT and “asked the oracle to help me find it. It said it found it. Showed me the picture… It just modified the original picture and put a random screw on it lol”
Other commenters had suggestions that didn’t involve AI at all, such as 4-jr1’s “how about next time you just open Spotify and listen for the one rock among hundreds that sings out loud” — although that wouldn’t work if the headphones weren’t on and paired; I have Bose QuietComfort earbuds and they don’t turn on until they’re in my ears — and SpehlingAirer’s “When this kinda thing happens to me I turn on my phone’s flashlight and bring it low to the ground pointing almost horizontally. The way the light reflects off the common background (gravel, carpet, grass, etc) and the way it reflects off the glossy plastic are often different enough to help spot it quickly.”
And of course many of the best earbuds have some variation of Find My, enabling you to locate them from your phone. But it’s nice to know that all those years we’ve been identifying bicycles, stairs and traffic lights in website CAPTCHAs has paid off: computer vision has become really incredible.
As to whether it’s reliable, I’ll just leave this, by AnalogAngeleno, here: “I tried something similar at a used bookstore. Took a photo of the shelve and asked it to help look for books since they were not in any kind of order. Unfortunately it started making up books that were not even there.”
Still, you’ll get different results depending on the type of task and the model you’re using — evidently, this one worked well enough, and seems like a good tip to keep in mind for your own earbud emergency.
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Carrie Marshall
