Two adult entertainment companies say the meta’s appetite for information has gone a little crazy. Strike 3 Holdings and CounterLife Media have filed a $359 million lawsuit alleging Meta illegally downloaded and seeded approximately 2,400 pornographic videos to train its artificial intelligence systems. The meta, naturally, argues that no! No! That was porn, uh…it was for personal use! Yes, it was…MeAnd No For massive copyright infringement!
Only in the world of AI algorithm training can you claim you were torrenting 2,400 porn videos for personal use and feel like it’s the lesser of two evils.
The lawsuit, filed in July, accuses Meta of “knowingly and knowingly” plagiarizing the titles of Strike 3’s adult brands, including Blacked, Tushie, Vixen, Tushie Raw, Slade, Blacked Raw, and my favorite name of the group – Deeper, with a period at the end.
The companies also suggest that Meta is building a secret porn-generating AI model, which is likely not a safe-for-work version of its upcoming video generator, Movie Gen.
Strike 3 is currently undergoing litigation, suing anyone who infringes its copyrights, including its own fans. The companies have become so synonymous with copyright lawsuits that search results for “Strike 3 copyright lawsuit” on Google come up specifically advertising law firms offering assistance to people sued by Strike 3. An entire legal cottage industry is being built around Strike 3 lawsuits.
The plaintiffs say they have proof: 47 IP addresses associated with Meta from which their movies were allegedly downloaded.
Meta’s motion to dismiss the case calls Strike 3’s torrent-tracking “conjecture and innuendo” and argues that the alleged downloads, which are about 22 per year, are too few to be of any use in training an AI. If anything, the company says this pattern looks less like corporate misconduct and more like “private personal use.”
Meta is claiming that some of its employees are downloading porn and possibly masturbating while at work. Again, this is probably the most favorable situation when the only other option is to accept that your company is stealing other people’s work in order to be able to automatically generate its own version.
To make sure someone here is completely embarrassed, the lawsuit isolates even one person. In this case, it is the father of a Meta contractor on whose home IP address 97 videos were allegedly downloaded. Strike 3 suggests this adds to the meta with more infractions. Meta counters that this just proves that someone’s dad is super into porn and doesn’t have any VPN.
Meta continues to insist that it does not, nor does not want to, train AI on porn and bans sexually explicit content from its models altogether. Given that OpenAI has recently opened itself up to generating erotica, it seems like it may only be a matter of time before the meta brings a flood of AI porn. If that ever happens, Strike 3 will have been perfect all along.