Data Harvesting
Ongoing coverage on Data Harvesting.
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Company that said it could scan and destroy books for AI data-harvesting has deleted that part of its website: 'no…
Third-party book database company ISBNdb has removed a section of its website that advertised sourcing printed books in bulk for AI training data. The company claims the page was a test of market interest and no such service was ever offered, despite evidence to the contrary. This comes amid reports of AI companies using third-party rebuyers to obscure their book-scanning and destruction practices for LLM training.
AI companies are anonymously buying and destroying millions of books through middleman services to avoid headlines about…
Major AI companies are reportedly using third-party services to anonymously purchase and destroy millions of physical books for training data, aiming to avoid negative public relations. This practice, highlighted by reporting on Anthropic's methods, involves sourcing rare and out-of-print books to create unique training datasets for large language models, with the destruction of books being deemed 'fair use' under copyright law.
Sonic fans couldn't wait for Sega's new alternate-reality game – until they spotted the AI training…
Sega has faced backlash from fans for using an event promoting Sonic's 35th anniversary to train artificial intelligence models. Participants in the "Chaos Emeralds hunt" event were required to consent to their data being collected and used for AI development by a third-party tool called Community. This follows previous criticism of Sega's use of generative AI in the development of Crazy Taxi: World Tour.
Pokemon Go’s Niantic has leveraged years of collected player data to train… delivery robots
Niantic, the developer behind Pokemon Go, is using player data collected from the game and its other AR title Ingress to train delivery robots for Coco Robotics. Approximately 30 billion images and various sensor data points have been leveraged to create centimeter-accurate maps for urban navigation. Niantic Spatial plans to continue gathering player data with voluntary consent to enhance its visual positioning system technology.