The creators of Pokémon Go have told users they want you to capture all 1,025 characters in a fun augmented reality version of their city. What they actually wanted was an army of bots that would take photos all over the world to help them develop their products.
Niantic L, the former Google subsidiary that developed Pokémon Go, has been using gamers to contribute large libraries of images for nearly a decade to hone its artificial intelligence mapping models.
Countries essentially have no choice but to engage in espionage on their own streets.
Users contributed to Niantic's 'Scaniverse' by enabling an option in Pokémon Go that places adorable monsters in the user's real world. This way, when a user looks at their phone, it appears as if a Pokemon character is standing on the street. At the park, or at a local store.
Niantic says the feature is “completely optional” and requires users to “visit a specific publicly accessible location and click to scan.”
Even though this feature is optional, the product download volume ( 600 million Enough data is now available to estimate the total
“We have trained over 50 million neural networks with over 150 trillion parameters and enabled them to operate in over 1 million locations,” Niantic boasted in the article. blog post. “We receive about 1 million new scans every week, and each scan contains hundreds of individual images.”
The blog post was edited after receiving a ton of bad press, adding that “just walking around and playing games doesn't train an AI model.”
However, it is not clear what exactly is meant by “individual” images.
actual product
It looks like Niantic's large-scale geospatial model could be used as a competitor to, or in addition to, Google Street View/Google Maps.
Where Google Maps can show users the facade of a monument or the entrance to a park, Pokémon Go uses thousands of images from a single location to train an AI model to understand the area's topography, dimensions, and operations. accurately determined the gender.
The real meaning behind Pokémon GO's scraping of user data doesn't seem to be to know where players are going or who they're with. It seems like Niantic simply wanted to find a way to get tens of millions of people to develop its product. .
The cost of a Pokemon license is nothing compared to the countless employees around the world who love their jobs but don't.
“Pokémon GO is just the beginning” Returns James Pross Said. “When it comes to the high-tech gray area of interactive digital overlays, this rapidly evolving frontier is mixing and blurring military intelligence and law enforcement data with commercial and recreational applications.”
It's clear that Niantic is moving toward using this data in its augmented reality glasses to further personalize the user experience in new consumerism. Similar to how social media platforms and Amazon use unique advertising IDs to suggest new mittens, Niantic says its AI models will not only “help with navigation,” but also guide users through the world and answer questions. , which expects to “deliver personalized recommendations.” ”
The company argued that a complex understanding of the environment gives people the opportunity to be more “informed and engaged with their surroundings.”
why they need you
Niantic explained that without users, it would be impossible to piece together the proper measurements and invisible aspects of a particular object or location.
For example, Niantic revealed that its geospatial model could not navigate well through the winding streets of an old European town due to varying altitudes and different aspects of objects.
The company notes that “their appearance changes based on the time of day or season…The shape of many artifacts follows specific symmetry rules or other common types of layout and is dependent on geographic region.” “It often happens,” he explains.
Many of the challenges faced by consumers were finding ways to find out how objects and places look from different angles. This “spatial understanding” is nearly impossible from satellite images, Street View cameras, and AI models, especially away from roads.
This inability to visualize “missing parts of the scene” was the missing link for Niantic to use augmented reality to properly position objects and send robots into unmapped terrain.
Eerily, the latter will help autonomous bots navigate these off-road locations.
“The robots are coming,” Poulos explained. “The public will no doubt look for boundaries where humanoid machines do not tread, but in the meantime we need internal guidelines for navigating the physical world, and we need them urgently.”
“It's a natural turnaround to slurp up data provided to us in large quantities by unsuspecting augmented reality players,” Pruss added.
Much like Mark Zuckerberg's meta, Niantic hopes the future aligns with AR glasses. Along with this comes the need to be able to recognize and locate things in the real world.
The company even called this connection to the real world the “operating system of the future.”
What could go wrong?
Asked about possible military applications for the geospatial model, Brian McClendon, Niantic's senior vice president of engineering, said, “It's definitely possible.”
“I think the question is, outside of what consumers and Bellingcat want to do with it, are they going to do anything with it?” he added. 404 Media.
One obvious application in wartime is to use spatial mapping of the enemy against the enemy. If a country maps every inch of its land, that data could be sold to its adversaries to develop a more complex understanding of that country's topography.
This makes it much easier for countries that have this information to implement large-scale strategies than countries that do not have such information.
But McClendon said such use would “obviously” be problematic if it “added scale to the war.”
He also said the project is “months, even years away” for any product, but declined to say whether user data would be sold.
“Important questions will arise, which we intend to address responsibly and thoughtfully.”
Niantic's team does not appear to have direct ties to the intelligence community, unlike many teams at the top of the tech industry. CEO John Hanke, art director Dennis Hwang, director Tatsuo Nomura, and the aforementioned McClendon are all former Googlers and Silicon Valley veterans.
This data appears ready to be exploited, but as it stands, all signs point to ruthless capitalism.
“Unfortunately, in the age of AI, this will happen more and more,” said Josh Centers, editor-in-chief of Unprepared.life.
“Tech companies have been collecting stockpiles of random data for years, but often don't know what to do with it. Well, the answer is obvious. [language model] And see what it comes up with. ”
This data collection appears to give multinational corporations, at least in some ways, more power than governments or standing armies. Countries essentially have no choice but to engage in espionage on their own streets.
Most countries, anyway. Russia didn't seem to approve of the Pokemon Go concept from the beginning, as it promoted it in 2016. my version An app focused on Russian culture and history.
Finally Niantic I pulled Pokemon GO from Russia and Belarus in 2022, reportedly in response to the Ukraine war.
However, it is quite possible that Russia did not want that to begin with. Did you know that?
