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This week, Meta asked a US district court to toss a lawsuit alleging that the tech giant illegally torrented pornography to train AI.<\/p>\n
The move comes after Strike 3 Holdings discovered illegal downloads of some of its adult films on Meta corporate IP addresses, as well as other downloads that Meta allegedly concealed using a \u201cstealth network\u201d of 2,500 \u201chidden IP addresses.\u201d Accusing Meta of stealing porn to secretly train an unannounced adult version of its AI model powering Movie Gen, Strike 3 sought damages that could have exceeded $350 million, TorrentFreak reported.<\/p>\n
Filing a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on Monday, Meta accused Strike 3 of relying on \u201cguesswork and innuendo,\u201d while alleging that Strike 3 \u201chas been labeled by some as a \u2018copyright troll\u2019 that files extortive lawsuits.\u201d Requesting that all copyright claims be dropped, Meta argued that there is no evidence that the tech giant directed any of the downloads of about 2,400 adult movies owned by Strike 3\u2014or was even aware of the illegal activity.<\/p>\n
Strike 3 also cited \u201cno facts to suggest that Meta has ever trained an AI model on adult images or video, much less intentionally so,\u201d Meta claimed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese claims are bogus,\u201d Meta\u2019s spokesperson told Ars.<\/p>\n
Notably, the alleged downloads spanned seven years, starting in 2018. That\u2019s about four years before Meta\u2019s AI efforts \u201cresearching Multimodal Models and Generative Video\u201d began, making it implausible the downloads were intended for AI training, Meta claims. An even more \u201cglaring\u201d defect, Meta claims, is that Meta\u2019s terms prohibit generating adult content, \u201ccontradicting the premise that such materials might even be useful for Meta\u2019s AI training.\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead, Meta claims, available evidence \u201cis plainly indicative\u201d that the flagged adult content was torrented for \u201cprivate personal use\u201d\u2014since the small amount linked to Meta IP addresses and employees represented only \u201ca few dozen titles per year intermittently obtained one file at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe far more plausible inference to be drawn from such meager, uncoordinated activity is that disparate individuals downloaded adult videos for personal use,\u201d Meta\u2019s filing says.<\/p>\n
For example, unlike lawsuits raised by book authors whose works are part of an enormous dataset used to train AI, the activity on Meta\u2019s corporate IP addresses allegedly only amounted to about 22 downloads per year. That is nowhere near the \u201cconcerted effort to collect the massive datasets Plaintiffs allege are necessary for effective AI training,\u201d Meta claims.<\/p>\n
Further, that alleged activity can\u2019t even reliably be linked to any Meta employee, Meta claims.<\/p>\n
Strike 3 \u201cdoes not identify any of the individuals who supposedly used these Meta IP addresses, allege that any were employed by Meta or had any role in AI training at Meta, or specify whether (and which) content allegedly downloaded was used to train any particular Meta model,\u201d Meta wrote.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, \u201ctens of thousands of employees,\u201d as well as \u201cinnumerable contractors, visitors, and third parties access the internet at Meta every day,\u201d Meta argued. So while it\u2019s \u201cpossible one or more Meta employees\u201d downloaded Strike 3\u2019s content over the past seven years, \u201cit is just as possible\u201d that a \u201cguest, or freeloader,\u201d or \u201ccontractor, or vendor, or repair person\u2014or any combination of such persons\u2014was responsible for that activity,\u201d Meta claims.<\/p>\n
Other alleged activity included a claim that a Meta contractor was directed to download adult content at his father\u2019s house, but those downloads, too, \u201care plainly indicative of personal consumption,\u201d Meta argued. That contractor worked as an \u201cautomation engineer,\u201d Meta noted, with no apparent basis provided for why he would be expected to source AI training data in that role. \u201cNo facts plausibly\u201d tie \u201cMeta to those downloads,\u201d Meta claims.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fact that the torrenting allegedly stopped when his contract with Meta ended says nothing about whether the alleged torrenting was performed with Meta\u2019s knowledge or at its direction,\u201d Meta wrote.<\/p>\n
Possibly most baffling to Meta in Strike 3\u2019s complaint, however, is the claim about the \u201cstealth network\u201d of hidden IPs. This presents \u201cyet another conundrum\u201d that Strike 3 \u201cfails to address,\u201d Meta claims, writing, \u201cwhy would Meta seek to \u2018conceal\u2019 certain alleged downloads of Plaintiffs\u2019 and third-party content, but use easily traceable Meta corporate IP addresses for many hundreds of others?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe obvious answer is that it would not do so,\u201d Meta claims, slamming Strike 3\u2019s \u201centire AI training theory\u201d as \u201cnonsensical and unsupported.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finally, Meta noted that Strike 3 cannot claim that Meta should have been better at \u201cpolicing\u201d its network for illegal activity. \u201cMonitoring every file downloaded by any person using Meta\u2019s global network would be an extraordinarily complex and invasive undertaking,\u201d Meta claims, citing precedent that only requires Meta employ a \u201csimple measure\u201d to monitor such activity.<\/p>\n
Meta is hoping the court will agree that Strike 3 failed to prove Meta had anything to do with the alleged illegal downloads. Strike 3 has two weeks to respond, TorrentFreak reported.<\/p>\n
For Meta, defeating the lawsuit is not just a matter of avoiding damages but also defending its commitment to ensuring its AI video tools don\u2019t generate explicit content that\u2019s increasingly regulated. In the filing, Meta claims that Strike 3 provided no evidence that Meta trained AI on its content, because \u201cthere was none.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t want this type of content, and we take deliberate steps to avoid training on this kind of material,\u201d Meta\u2019s spokesperson told Ars.<\/p>\n
This story originally appeared on<\/em> Ars Technica.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story This week, Meta asked a US district court to toss a lawsuit alleging that the tech giant illegally torrented pornography to train AI. The move comes after Strike 3 Holdings discovered illegal downloads of some of its adult films on Meta corporate IP addresses, as well as other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37203,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-37202","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}