Meta forgot to keep its porn in a passworded folder, and now its kink for data collection is the subject of scrutiny. The social media giant turned metaverse company turned AI power is currently facing a lawsuit brought by adult film companies Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media, alleging that the Big Tech staple illegally torrented thousands of porn videos to be used for training AI models. Meta denies the claims, and recently filed a motion to dismiss the case because, in part, it’s more likely the videos were downloaded for “private personal use.”
To catch up on the details of the case, back in July, Strike 3 Holdings (the producers of Blacked, Blacked Raw, Tushy, Tushy Raw, Vixen, MILFY, and Slayed) and Counterlife Media accused Meta of having “willfully and intentionally” infringed “at least 2,396 movies” by downloading and seeding torrents of the content. The companies claim that Meta used that material to train AI models and allege the company may be planning a currently unannounced adult version of its AI video generator Movie Gen, and are suing for $359 million in damages.
For what it’s worth, Strike 3 has something of a reputation of being a very aggressive copyright litigant—so much so that if you search the company, you’re less likely to land on its homepage than you are to find a litany of law firms that offer legal representation to people who have received a subpoena from the company for torrenting their material.
There may be some evidence that those materials were swept up in Meta’s data vacuum. Per TorrentFreak, Strike 3 was able to show what appear to be 47 IP addresses linked to Meta participating in torrenting of the company’s material. But Meta doesn’t seem to think much of the accusation. In its motion to dismiss, the company calls Strike 3’s torrent tracking “guesswork and innuendo,” and basically argues that, among other reasons, there simply isn’t even enough data here to be worth using for AI model training. Instead, it’s more likely just some gooners in the ranks.
“The small number of downloads—roughly 22 per year on average across dozens of Meta IP addresses—is plainly indicative of private personal use, not a concerted effort to collect the massive datasets Plaintiffs allege are necessary for effective AI training,” the company argued. The company also denied building a porn generator model, basically stating that Strike 3 doesn’t have any evidence of this and Meta’s own terms of service prohibit its models from generating pornographic content.
“These claims are bogus: We don’t want this type of content, and we take deliberate steps to avoid training on this kind of material,” a spokesperson for Meta told Gizmodo.
As absurd as the case is, whether the accusations are right or wrong, there is one clear victim: the dad of a Meta contractor who is apparently simultaneously being accused by Strike 3 of being a conduit for copyright infringement and accused by Meta of being a degenerate: “[Strike 3] point to 97 additional downloads made using the home IP address of a Meta contractor’s father, but plead no facts plausibly tying Meta to those downloads, which are plainly indicative of personal consumption,” Meta’s motion said. God forbid this case move forward and this poor person has to answer for his proclivities reserved for incognito tabs.
