Meta denies torrenting porn to train AI, says downloads were for “personal use”

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 downloads that Meta allegedly concealed using a “stealth network” of 2,500 “hidden IP addresses.” 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.

Filing a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on Monday, Meta accused Strike 3 of relying on “guesswork and innuendo,” while writing that Strike 3 “has been labeled by some as a ‘copyright troll’ that files extortive lawsuits.” Requesting that all copyright claims be dropped, Meta argued that there was no evidence that the tech giant directed any of the downloads of about 2,400 adult movies owned by Strike 3—or was even aware of the illegal activity.

Strike 3 also cited “no facts to suggest that Meta has ever trained an AI model on adult images or video, much less intentionally so,” Meta argued.

“These claims are bogus,” Meta’s spokesperson told Ars.

Meta argues downloads were for “personal use”

Notably, the flagged downloads spanned seven years, starting in 2018. That’s about four years before Meta’s AI efforts “researching Multimodal Models and Generative Video” began, making it implausible the downloads were intended for AI training, Meta argued. An even more “glaring” defect, Meta argued, is that Meta’s terms prohibit generating adult content, “contradicting the premise that such materials might even be useful for Meta’s AI training.”