You didn't poison Pokemon Go's AI

In April 2026 I released a video about how Niantic uses Pokémon Go scans to build a large geospatial model (https://youtu.be/Vk95ZO-WAvY). Thousands of you commented with the same idea: "I spoofed my location" or "joke's on them, I scanned the ground." You believed you were poisoning the well. You weren't. And there are two reasons why, one of which nobody in the comments saw coming. This video walks through what actually happens when you do an AR scan, why your GPS coordinates were only ever a hint and never trainable data, and how Niantic's quality checks and bundle adjustment throw out exactly the kind of garbage people thought they were feeding it. Then it gets worse: the scans you already gave up trained the baseline, and Niantic has moved on to drone imagery through its partnership with Spexi, capturing the places you can't reach. Learn to build full-stack apps with Payload — https://nlvcodes.com/courses/payload-essentials Become a member: Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/cw/nick_vogel YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8mOjhMBTyPPScCF9vYtwFg/join Find me on X — https://x.com/nlvogel Want to stay up to date with recent web dev news? Subscribe to my newsletter — https://news.nlvcodes.com/subscribe 0:00 The comments all said the same thing 1:40 Your GPS location was only ever a hint 3:05 Inside the scan pipeline and its quality checks 5:35 Why bad scans wash out 7:46 They've moved on 9:51 It was never a fight