Meta has denied allegations that it used adult content pirated from the web to train its AI models. The statement from Meta comes in response to a lawsuit filed by adult film production company Strike 3 Holdings, which stated that Meta corporate IP addresses were used to download thousands of adult films via BitTorrent.
The studio claimed that Meta pirated at least 2,396 of its “award-winning, critically acclaimed adult motion pictures” to train its Meta Movie Gen, Large Language Model (“LLaMA”), as well as various other Meta AI Models that rely on video training content.
Meta asked the U.S. District Court judge to dismiss the lawsuit, stating that Strike 3 had shared “no facts to suggest that Meta has ever trained an AI model on adult images or video, much less intentionally so.”
”Plaintiffs go to great lengths to stitch this narrative together with guesswork and innuendo, but their claims are neither cogent nor supported by well-pleaded facts,” the tech giant added.
Meta called the allegations “nonsensical and unsupported,” while noting that Strike 3 “files thousands of lawsuits” and “has been labeled by some as a ‘copyright troll’ that files extortive lawsuits.”
The tech giant also said that its contractors, visitors, or employees may have used Meta’s internet access over the years for ‘personal use.’
Meta also said that Meta AI’s terms of service “explicitly prohibit users from attempting to generate adult content or pornography,” which contradicts the premise of the lawsuit that adult content could be useful for training Meta AI models.
Meta also took on the claims made by Strike 3 that the company should have better monitored its network for illegal activity, stating, “Monitoring every file downloaded by any person using Meta’s global network would be an extraordinarily complex and invasive undertaking.”
Notably, there have been a lot of lawsuits filed in the last few years against AI companies over the use of so-called publicly available data they used to train their AI models.
Meta alone has been sued both in the U.S. and France by authors claiming that the tech giant used their copyrighted work to train its large language models.
The Mark Zuckerberg-led company has also been at the receiving end of criticism recently after users complained of seeing suggestions of chatting with many inappropriate chatbots on Instagram and other Meta-led social media channels, including ‘Russian Girl,’ ‘Step Mom,’ and others.
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