Niantic plans a “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?

> 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.

I don't think this is very difficult to sort out: people feel entitled to the products of their labor.

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

This is comparing apples and oranges: presumably the consumer didn't do anything to produce the vegetable. Hell if anything, under this analogy niantic would owe users a portion of their profits.

Niantic was clear about the product of the labor: In exchange for swiping the PokeStop, you'd get the rewards. No one was ever told they'd get more than that, and no one had any reasonable expectation that they'd get more.

Exactly! Everyone thought that the exchange was them doing something in the game, and Niantic was giving them the rewards in the game, and no one had any reasonable expectation that Niantic would get more outside of the game. (After all, neither Blizzard or Square get anything when one completes quest objectives in their MMO.)

So obviously, now that Niantic is getting things outside the game its reasonable the people who did the work ask for something from that.