The folks begging the artist not to release their tools are sort of approaching this from the wrong direction. The problem isn't the tools, which given the information in the article can now be reasonably replicated. The problem is access to the input data.
They should be clamouring for laws that prevent public recording, or from those recordings being made available to others.
It's not clear that there are any tools. A dedicated person could do it by hand for the six photos presented. And that's assuming they don't have any other context making the time/date location obvious (maybe he picked Instagram posts where the caption said "Look where I was at 3pm yesterday!"- some of those are probably lies, but you just have to find one that isn't)
These days, there are people who are extremely good at locating much harder photos in time and space. This one is relatively simple:
This was almost certainly a manual process by the artist.
The state of the art of commonly available surveillance AI products would not add much in terms of making this process faster or more accurate. (source: I work in surveillance AI).
IMO this is really more a of a proof of concept or statement on where things COULD go if currently technology trends progress for another decade or so.
Yeah, it's a kind of sleight-of-hand or a magic trick- who would spend hours scrubbing the Times Square cameras to match up with Instagram posts? An artist making something like this would.
Magic tricks often operate in the same way, you have some meticulous preparation that can produce a specific result, one time, under specific conditions. If you obfuscate the preparation and people don't realize how specific the conditions are, then it looks like something more profound happened than really did.
> Then he enlisted an artificial intelligence (A.I.) bot, which scraped public Instagram photos taken in those locations, and facial-recognition software, which paired the Instagram images with the real-time surveillance footage.
Why would he need an "AI which scraped public Instagram photos"? You can just ask Instagram for photos tagged "Times Square" and get loads of them. Totally unnecessary to teach an AI what Times Square looks like when there are a bazillion tagged photos of Times Square being posted every hour. Maybe you need a lot of them, but "bulk scraping lots of Instagram posts" isn't exactly AI.
They should be clamouring for laws that prevent public recording, or from those recordings being made available to others.