I might miss the train to the shiny AI generated future. Oh well. So much is being gushed over because it looks so good, it feels right, it has all the appeal of truthiness.
Yet I have these encounters, which may be edge cases or that Mike Caulfield if he ever would speak to me again (I get it, you don’t want non flattering comments, Mike) could pick apart.
But still, I see some cracks in the assumptions built upon mega systems relying solely on statistical conclusions, ingoring lived experiences. Perhaps these are just irrelevant. But I think about this a lot. And this is what ends up taking me down curious holes of distraction, keeping me from doing emails and other “tasks” I Should Be Doing.
I saw a reference to a recommended photo editing software called aphera. I scroll down at the sample photos (which are great). Sure I recognize the bridge. but right away, my own experiences take me to that third image.
That third photo I know for sure is in Arizona. The Saguaro cacti are a give away, but that hill shape too is familiar for the Sonoran desert anywhere slightly north pf Phoenix down to the border. The aperha image just shows me a larger view of the photo, no info about it (who took it? where is it?).
My curiosity wont stop, so I try the reverse image search or what ever AI has glommed on as Google lens. It readily asserts on identifying the vehicle, and its pretty savvy (I think I have no experience), with its confident declaration (which comes from ??)
The image shows a white SUV (a Lexus GX 470 or Toyota 4Runner) outfitted for desert camping with a yellow Go Fast Campers (GFC) Superlite rooftop tent deployed, parked next to a campsite table and fire ring in an arid, cactus-studded landscape. [1, 2]
Google AI telling me whats in the photo.
The “references” just find other examples of this camper. But let’s do some chatting, eh? I ask the damn thing “Where in Arizona is this located?” And of course it has a certain answer:
How does it “know” this? What is this drawn from? What is its “thinking” Who knows?
But I try to untangle. If it “knows” this is the Twin Peaks Campground at Organ Pipe National Monument, I can go check it out. And yes, maybe the third photo in is a maybe match for the mountain background. But it’s the photos of the campground tables and firepits, plus how all the sites have concrete pads from the image gallery that clicks the “maybe this is not right?”
It goes back to the second reference from the determination of where this was, a reditt post for First Big Trip for 2026 from someone who camped at Organ Pipe with a similar kind of camper.
So it finds a similar style photo with a location at Twin Peaks Campground. But look at the style of the table and the grill, and compare again to the original photo from the aperha site:
I have camped mant places in Arizona but never at the Twin Peaks Campground, but I can tell by comparison that more rugged camp spot, with a different style table and fire pit does not match the style at this campground.
When I download the file from the apera site, the file name is a maybe clue – gallery_overland_camp.jpg which then in a search leads me to Camp Overland in Patagonia, AZ and in the photos there I see the kind of camp spots that better match this photo.
I have not really proven it for sure, but I find the GenAI inference to be extremely weak, basing its answer to “where is this” to finding a similar style camper and then asserting the location is the same.
This. Is. The. House. Of. Squishy. Logic. Y’all. Are. Counting. On.
Not me. I will draw upon my own experiences and inferences, no more right, but I will bot make conclusions from spurious statistical correlations.
Featured Image: Slide6 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I have little memory what this image was meant to be, it’s part of a series of flickr “slides” from a 2007 talk in Perth on Virtual Worlds: Promise and Perils so quaint in hindsight!
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