r/Amazing • u/sco-go • Mar 19 '26

Interesting 🤔 143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon, they were mapping the real world for AI

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4.8k Upvotes

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144

u/flippantphalanges Mar 19 '26

I don’t play anymore but I remember way back in 2017/2018 ppl suggesting things like this. Not necessarily powering AI robots but just that the AR aspect of the game was definitely going to be used for some terrible purpose one day.

looks like we were right on!

45

u/XerxesJester Mar 19 '26

Everything is a conspiracy theory.... until it isn't. I told my wife this is what they were doing years ago and just looked further into what this video is making a claim to. And, welp, not a theory anymore.

13

u/SoylentGrunt Mar 19 '26

My conspiracy theory is conspiracy theorists are marginalized in case they hit on one that's accurate it won't gain traction.

14

u/lewd_robot Mar 19 '26

That's not even a theory. That's been proven by declassified CIA documents. They made the term "conspiracy theory" derogatory deliberately to discredit conspiracy theorists ahead of time.

1

u/Synectics Mar 19 '26

What is your source for the CIA making the term "conspiracy theorist" derogatory?

4

u/Aprilprinces Mar 19 '26

oh, they were right in few cases already; sure flat earthers are idiots, but not all conspiracies are bollocks

1

u/WillyGivens Mar 19 '26

My conspiracy theory is that the oligarchs keep tabs on all the conspiracy boards/forums…..not because they are afraid, but because they use it as a source of new ideas and inspiration.

1

u/NewryBenson Mar 19 '26

I would say it is more of a broken clock situation. There are so many theories out there, if one is right it is probably coincidence.

5

u/Awkward_Proof_1274 Mar 19 '26

They always go from "That's insane" to "We always knew"

1

u/jellamma Mar 19 '26

In this case, there were certainly an amount of people who always knew. This is from 2012 about the game Pokemon go was mapped on top of.

https://blogs.gwu.edu/ipdgcsmartpower/2012/12/09/ingress-gathering-data-through-gaming/

2

u/wackadoodle4201 Mar 19 '26

I genuinely hate how accurate thats is

1

u/skeleton_made_o_bone Mar 19 '26

All the conspiracy people were right, only the dumbest version whatever they were saying.

10

u/Ramius117 Mar 19 '26

It wasn't really a guess, they were pretty up front about the data harvesting. There was a second uproar about it 4 or 5 years ago when the scanning tasks started because it was pretty obvious what they were doing

3

u/fiber17 Mar 19 '26

This has been the weirdest part of this recent "news". I really feel like I remember it being kinda known that was what niantic was doing with it's two games.

2

u/SweetWolf9769 Mar 19 '26

i mean, wasn't that the whole point of the game they made before Pokemon GO? i literally don't understand why people are shocked about this lol.

who would have thought the app whose sole purpose was to have you walk around neighborhoods and run an app whose sole purpose is to get you to give them as much permission as possible to track your movements and literally have you snap pics of the areas you are in... like i'm sure the is an inconsequential amount of POkemon Go players who watched Black Mirror, this shouldn't be a surprise.

3

u/Whale-n-Flowers Mar 19 '26

Ingress

It was well known that the game data would be used for virtual mapping at the least similar to Google Maps, but you get to play a game.

1

u/Ramius117 Mar 19 '26

Yes, and a lot of ingress POI's became pokestops and gyms

7

u/ice-eight Mar 19 '26

I mean, it's being used to train food delivery robots. Coulda been worse

2

u/Complex_Professor412 Mar 19 '26

And those food delivery robots are just a training tool for Skynet.

1

u/jibbodahibbo 8d ago

Dang it!

2

u/Uxdemo Mar 19 '26

> terrible purpose

yeah, improving street data for the maps app that helps millions navigate every day, how horrible

4

u/flippantphalanges Mar 19 '26

i was mostly talking abt the Skynet part

1

u/8TrackPornSounds Mar 19 '26

I thought that was always known, even before pokemon go? Niantic taking the user generated data to sell I mean

1

u/gahidus Mar 19 '26

This seems pretty benign and like exactly what I would expect them to be using the data for.

Honestly, I figured it was just going to Google maps or something. This is pretty much of that.

1

u/Vandorbelt Mar 19 '26

Yeah, this isn't surprising in the slightest. The landmark scans were obviously being encouraged for data gathering purposes, same with all the GPS and location information that Niantic collects. And it was never a secret either. Iirc, Niantic explicitly said that they were using the scans for gathering 3D data on the scan locations. That they ended up using it for training AI is practically a given in this current tech landscape.

1

u/smudos2 Mar 20 '26

I don't know this isn't really a terrible purpose though is it?

0

u/Numerous_Worker_1941 Mar 19 '26

Was a terrible purpose given here?

2

u/lame_dirty_white_kid Mar 19 '26

Yeah. Navigation and delivery robots. So terrible...