>The game creator Niantic Labs revealed that the Pokemon Go map was derived from a previous augmented reality game, Ingress. Ingress crowdsourced its map from users, who tended to be young, male, white, and English-speaking.
Similarly, from the attached article:
>"It turns out Niantic, which makes Pokémon Go, relied on a map from a previous augmented reality game called Ingress, which was crowd-sourced from its mostly male, tech-savvy players," she wrote in a blog post. "The result is a high concentration of PokéStops in commercial and downtown areas of some cities, while there are typically fewer PokéStops in non-white or residential areas, if there are any at all."
It could be there is some other AI-related problem for Pokemon Go hidden in one of the other articles (they all seem to be about unrelated things - one is about Jynx, one is about the experiences of a black person playing the game, another is speculating the Pokemon Go is a CIA operation...), but the incident report itself doesn't make any allegations of an AI-related issue.
I'm still not sure if some of those stories were viral marketing or just a bizarre reflection of our zeitgeist in the black mirror.[0]
[0] - Exampled by: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3734361/Woman-tells...
If I recall rightly the Pokémon Go locations were derived in part from an earlier (and far better) game called Ingress. Players could submit candidate locations, but it's possible that this was mostly ignored, and/or some form of AI was used to select or filter those candidates. It's also possible that Ingress had a racial bias in its userbase.