Danica Davidson
November 21, 2024 
Millions of people have played Pokémon GO since its launch in 2016, and millions have unknowingly helped train AI by doing so.
Niantic explained on its site, “When you look at a familiar type of structure – whether it’s a church, a statue, or a town square – it’s fairly easy to imagine what it might look like from other angles, even if you haven’t seen it from all sides. As humans, we have ‘spatial understanding’ that means we can fill in these details based on countless similar scenes we’ve encountered before. But for machines, this task is extraordinarily difficult. Even the most advanced AI models today struggle to visualize and infer missing parts of a scene, or to imagine a place from a new angle. This is about to change: Spatial intelligence is the next frontier of AI models.”
The company continued, “As part of Niantic’s Visual Positioning System (VPS), we have trained more than 50 million neural networks, with more than 150 trillion parameters, enabling operation in over a million locations. In our vision for a Large Geospatial Model (LGM), each of these local networks would contribute to a global large model, implementing a shared understanding of geographic locations, and comprehending places yet to be fully scanned.”
While Niantic is happy with these technical movements, a number of concerns have been expressed by people outside the company. For one, millions of people didn’t know that by playing Pokémon GO, they were unwittingly training AI. If they had known, they might not have done it.
There are also concerns about what the AI is going to be used for. Niantic said it’s for “robotics, content creation and autonomous systems.” One theory online — which at this point is only a theory, and has not been confirmed or denied by Niantic — is that AI spacial reasoning could be used for military means, like AI-powered weapons. Whether or not it’s true, that theory is getting a lot of attention, including in the news.
Artificial intelligence is a controversial subject, and people in the otaku world, like actors, artists and translators, have expressed concerns over it.
What do you think about Niantic’s move, and people training AI without being aware of it?
Source: PC Magazine, Live Science, Niantic
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Danica Davidson is the author of the bestselling Manga Art for Beginners with artist Melanie Westin, plus its sequel, Manga Art for Everyone, and the first-of-its-kind manga chalk book Chalk Art Manga, both illustrated by professional Japanese mangaka Rena Saiya. Check out her other comics and books at www.danicadavidson.com.
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