I mean this is a summary of a talk I didn’t see so I want to reserve some judgement. But at the same time I just can’t imagine being in a situation where I don’t want to use the word signal because the other person might think I’m talking about cell signal, so instead I bust out “kodo”
In general, I think we should be pretty wary of taking basic ideas and dressing them up in fancy words. It serves no purpose other than in-group signaling.
I think even if the model wasn’t specifically trained for geolocation, it’s a reasonable assumption that metadata from photos (which often includes geo data) somehow gets passed to the models and this created a huge annotated dataset of (geo, photo) pairs during training for stuff like searching Google images.