Niantic announces “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

This is pretty cool, but I feel as a pokehunter (Pokemon Go player), I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor. How? They consistently incentivize you to scan pokestops (physical locations) through "research tasks" and give you some useful items as rewards. The effort is usually much more significant than what you get in return, so I have stopped doing it. It's not very convenient to take a video around the object or location in question. If they release the model and weights, though, I will feel I contributed to the greater good.

They won't. It's the same data collection play as every other Google project

Just for clarity on this comment and a separate one, Niantic is a Google spin out company and appears to still be majority shareholder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic,_Inc.#As_an_independen...

Google actually has released weights for some of their models, but judging by the fact that this model is potentially valuable, they likely will not allow Niantic for this

> Google actually has released weights for some of their models, but judging by the fact that this model is potentially valuable, they likely will not allow Niantic for this

which is totally unfair, every niantic player should have access to all the stuff because they collectively made it

> which is totally unfair, every niantic player should have access to all the stuff because they collectively made it

I don't understand this perspective. While all players may have collectively made this model possible, no individual player could make a model like it based on their contributions alone.

Since no single player could replicate this outcome based on only their data, does it not imply that there's value created from collecting (and incentivizing collection of) the data, and subsequently processing it to create something?

It actually seems more unfair to demand the collective result for yourself, when your own individual input is itself insufficient to have created it in the first place.

I don't think producers of data are inherently entitled to all products produced from said data.

Is a farmer entitled to the entirety of your work output because you ate a vegetable grown on their farm?

“Is a farmer entitled to the entirety of your work output because you ate a vegetable grown on their farm?”

Bad analogy. I pay a farmer (directly or indirectly) for the vegetable. It’s a simple, understood, transaction. These players were generally unaware that they were gathering data for Niantic in this way.

If data is crowdsourced it should belong to the crowd.