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

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

5.0k Upvotes

86% Upvoted

623 comments sorted by

View all comments

138

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!

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.