If you participated in the Mannequin Challenge, surprise: you may have helped train robots. In 2016, the Mannequin Challenge seemed to totally take over people’s feeds. It got so big that even celebrities ( Destiny’s Child, anybody? ) got involved. Recently, MIT Technology Review reported that a team from Google AI scrapped videos of people doing the Mannequin Challenge to train neural networks . Researchers used the videos so they could train AI to better recognize depth in videos. To build their dataset, researchers scrapped 2,000 videos from YouTube. Then, researchers converted all the videos into 2D images, estimated the camera pose, and created depth maps. As a result of their methods, the AI system was able to predict the depth of moving objects in video way better than before. This technology can be helped to develop better self-driving cars or robots who can navigate new areas. However, the researcher’s methods open up a lot of questions about how consent operates in the...