Pokemon Go Trained Robots with Data

Shocker: Pokemon Go players handed tech companies a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images to train artificial intelligence

Most people reading this have no idea this is happening. Not just Pokemon Go. All of it. Everything we do is tracked. Our data is sold a million times over. Lawsuits get settled. The general public moves on because at this point we are completely dependent on these products and the companies behind them know it.

Tech companies can do whatever they want to us and we have no real recourse. That has been true since the beginning of the internet and Pokemon Go is just the funniest version of it.

Here is what actually happened.

143 million people thought they were catching Pikachu. They were building the largest real-world visual dataset in the history of artificial intelligence. Niantic just disclosed that photos and AR scans collected through Pokemon Go have produced a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images.

Not million. Billion. Thirty of them.

That company is now using that data to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots that can identify exact locations on city streets without GPS.

At peak popularity in 2016, 230 million people were playing every single month. A billion total downloads. People were quitting jobs. Skipping funerals. Walking into traffic. It was a genuine civilizational event built around catching fake animals and it was completely free to download.

Free to play. No catch.

There is always a catch. Remember this.

In 2020 Niantic added a feature called Field Research. The app would point you at a real-world location, a statue, a storefront, a fountain, a landmark, and ask you to walk around it and scan it with your camera. Do that and you would get in-game rewards. Fake coins. Digital candy. Items that exist only as code on a server somewhere.

Players thought it was a fun little side quest. What was actually happening was one of the greatest data collection operations in human history.

Shocker: Pokemon Go was the Greatest Data Heist in Human History.

Each scan was not just a photo. It was a photo plus exact GPS coordinates, camera angle, time of day, weather conditions, and player movement data.

Millions of different people scanning the same locations from different heights, angles, and lighting conditions produced a dataset of extraordinary precision. Better than anything a professional mapping operation could build because no professional mapping operation has hundreds of millions of volunteer employees who work for fake coins.

Sidewalks. Storefronts. Office buildings. Parks. Stairwells. Schools. Every corner of human civilization photographed from every possible angle by people who thought they were doing a side quest.

The terms of service, which obviously nobody read, stated clearly that Niantic owned anything uploaded through the AR functions of their products and could do whatever they wanted with it including sell it to whoever they felt like.

Niantic spun out a company called Niantic Spatial and sold it. The valuation? Three and a half billion dollars. Built entirely for free by a billion unpaid volunteers over a decade. Their first major commercial partnership is with Coco Robotics, those little pink delivery robots that roll around city sidewalks.

Those robots now navigate using technology powered by your Pokemon walks. CEO John Hanke actually told MIT Technology Review with a straight face that getting Pikachu to realistically run around and getting a delivery robot to safely navigate a sidewalk is the same problem.

Now here is where it stops being funny.

John Hanke did not just wake up one day and decide to build a Pokemon game. Before Niantic, before Pokemon Go, Hanke co-founded a company called Keyhole Inc. Named after the military reconnaissance satellites used to watch people from space.

Keyhole built a program called Earth Viewer. Earth Viewer became Google Earth. Google Earth became Google Maps. The thing on your phone right now that knows where you are at all times.

The CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, invested in Keyhole. Within two weeks of that investment, Keyhole’s mapping technology was deployed to support Pentagon operations in Iraq.

Two weeks. They did not let the ink dry. Google acquired Keyhole in 2004. Hanke joined Google, oversaw the transformation of the technology into Google Earth and Google Maps, and then founded Niantic inside Google.

The former CEO of the CIA’s venture capital arm currently sits on the board of Niantic. The company that made Pokemon Go. That collected thirty billion scans of the real world from a billion unpaid volunteers.

Make of that what you will.

This is not a new playbook. Google ran reCAPTCHA for years, those little boxes asking you to click on traffic lights to prove you were not a robot. What was actually happening was image recognition AI training on a massive scale. 819 million hours of unpaid labor. $6.1 billion in unpaid wages by some estimates.

Every person who clicked a fire hydrant to check their email was teaching machines to see. reCAPTCHA was never primarily a security tool. The dataset was always the point.

Waze crowdsourced an entire real-time mapping system from its users. Google bought it for 1.3 billion dollars. Our commute data. Their acquisition.

Pokemon Go, Google, Waze, LITERALLY EVERY TECH COMPANY

And now with AI, every prompt typed into ChatGPT, every conversation with a chatbot, every correction a coder makes when the output is wrong. All training data. We are the unpaid research assistant.

The AI gets smarter every time we use it, the company captures that interaction and improves the product, and then sells access back to us at a premium on a subscription model.

We create the content. They own the content. They train the models on the content. They sell the models back to us. We pay.

The Pokemon Go players at least got to go outside and touch grass. The rest of us are training AI from the couch.

There are still five million people playing Pokemon Go every single day right now. Every scan they run feeds back into the model. The dataset is still growing. The robots are getting smarter. And almost nobody knows any of this is happening.

If something is free, you are the product. The craziest part is that none of this is even remotely new. We always were the product, but it took something like Pokemon Go to finally wake up the general public to the harsh reality of the world we live in. Go figure.

Join The Chase

unfiltered, opinionated, and certainly do not care if you like it or not.

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Comments (1)

  1. Just wait till scientist can simulate an entire human brain (just been done with a common fruit fly, Source: UC Barkeley News), then you’ll have that paired with this and we’ll officially have entered the Matrix.

    Reply

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