How terrifying is the AI procured by US police? A single photo of a washing machine can be used to trace back to a house.

Beating AI News Flash: U.S. AI company Graylark's Raven has added an indoor geolocation feature that can identify the corresponding house from just a single room photo. In a demonstration, a photo of a washing machine and dryer taken from X matched a Airbnb listing in Charlotte, USA, within seconds. Switching to a bathroom photo, it found a Vrbo listing in California. 404 Media verified that the listing names returned by the system did indeed correspond to real rental information. In another demonstration, Raven also used Zillow property photos to find the specific address of a residence in San Francisco from an indoor photo.

Raven, formerly known as GeoSpy, previously determined photo locations mainly through outdoor features such as buildings and vegetation, but now it can search for specific properties. It does not require GPS information attached to the photo, nor does it rely on finding an exact image match. The system compares details such as room layout, beams and columns, and tiles to find the same house among listing photos from platforms such as Airbnb, Vrbo, and Zillow, and then links it to location information. Graylark says short-term rental searches cover millions of listings worldwide, while street address lookups for ordinary homes are supported only in some cities.

This also means that even if listing platforms hide the specific address, indoor photos may still expose the property's location. Airbnb said the platform removes location data from photos, only guests with successful bookings can see the full address, and it has never cooperated with Graylark, while platform rules also prohibit data scraping.

In February this year, 404 Media confirmed based on internal police emails that both the Los Angeles Police Department and the Miami-Dade County Sheriff's Office had purchased this tool. Graylark hopes to use it for cases such as human trafficking, but the actual results are not as certain as the promotional videos. Miami-Dade police previously said the trial mainly remained at the exploratory stage and had not yet led to major investigative breakthroughs or arrests.