If you
thought that going for a walk at 3 p.m. under a hellish sun to catch a
hat-wearing Pikachu was just an innocent pastime to get out of your cave,
congratulations: you just found out you were unpaid labor for
a tech megacorporation. It turns out that millions of Pokémon GO players
helped, unaware of the magnitude of the project, to create the largest database
of real-world images in history to train Artificial Intelligence.
The
biggest deception of virtual "farming"
Let's
remember. A few years ago, Niantic implemented an "optional" feature
that asked you to scan with your phone's camera stops, statues, parks, and
buildings in exchange for a few in-game rewards. Always thirsty for Pokéballs
and raid passes, players blindly obeyed and recorded their surroundings from
all angles, in any weather, at all hours of the day.
The result
of this army of free cameramen? Niantic amassed the monstrous and intimidating
amount of more than 30 billion street-level images. With this treasure
trove in its hands, the company created what they call a "Large Geospatial
Model" (basically, the equivalent of a ChatGPT-like language model, but
designed to understand exact physical spaces with a margin of error of just a
few centimeters).
From
catching Pokémon to guiding delivery robots
The
company's master plan was fully revealed when its Niantic Spatial division
(which became independent in 2025 to focus on squeezing this AI) announced its
recent alliance with Coco Robotics. The latter is a company that
manufactures those small robots the size of a suitcase that deliver food at
home on the sidewalks of several cities.
Because GPS
signals often fail miserably between tall buildings, these robots now use their
cameras to compare what they see in real time with the gigantic database of
images you helped them build while trying to capture a Snorlax. It's absolute
corporate genius: they managed to get humans to map every last alley on the
planet on foot (something Google Street View cars can't do) by paying them
exclusively with pixels.
Knowing
that your obsession with farming rewards helped create one of
the most advanced navigational artificial intelligences on the planet, do you
feel like Niantic owes you a royalty check, or do you settle for the three
Ultimate Potions they gave you in return for your hard work in the field?
