p3x.de
Meta was “allegedly” seeding porn to speed up their book downloads.
Sounds like meta’s judge will have to invent a grand unified theory of fair use to excuse this.
I kept saying about various lawsuits that the important thing is discovery. Nobody knew all the idiotic shit these folks were doing, so nobody could sue them properly.
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Top notch journalism. Even today, the "legit" sites either have an "I am over 18" button at best, and in general they just block users from states with more stringent requirements. Are we really supposed to hate seeders, just because arstechnica says so?
They're pointing out the double standard.
If you seed porn, its a federal offense.
If Meta does it, its capitalism.
While I agree with you to a point, they didn't stop there or even bother to really make that point at all. They are escalating the seeding of porn to the willful distribution of porn to children. The fact its a corporation doing the seeding just makes for an easy target for such escalation.
Ars Technica is not asserting that themselves, that's the argument that Strike3 is making. Strike3 and other porn companies attack non-professional porn on these grounds as well, to try to kill their competition.
zeroHow funny would it be if that employee was on a different team and was torrenting for personal use and got caught up in this lol.
So what are they doing with the data? Is this all being fed into the LLM or image generating AI to create ultra realistic porn? To what end? I don't see their endgame unless it involves sexbots.
Pure speculation: ;possibly to identify sexual nudity and "inappropriate" content as some kind of legitimate usecase. What was actually done, I have no idea.
This feels most likely to me.
Meta doesn't exactly want to taint their brand image with purely sexual content being generated by their base models, so it's probably for either content classification, and/or the also likely fine-tuning of their LLMs and other generative models in reverse - that is to say, fine tuning them to not create content that is like what they're then being fed.
Let's be honest now... Zuckerberg is building a globally-distributed, industrial-scale, disaster-proof spank bank for himself.
A lot of artists will practice anatomy by drawing people nude, largely because it’s hard to get a good understanding of anatomy by only drawing people with clothes on.
If you wanted to put some examples of bare human anatomy in odd positions to expand the range that the model is capable of, well there aren’t many larger corpuses of that than porn.
Also, even if they don’t want it to make explicit content, they probably want it to make “suggestive” or “appealing” content. And they just assume they can guide rail it away from making actual explicit content. Although that’s probably pretty short sighted given how weak guardrails really are.
Well, Stable Diffusion 3 supposedly purposefully removed all porn from their training and negatively trained the model on porn and it apparently destroyed the model's ability to generate proper anatomy.
Regardless, image generation models need some porn in training to at least know what porn is so that they know what porn is not.
It's part of a process called regularization, or preventing any particular computational model from over-fitting.
talMeta get's to look up a lot of porn illegally but UK needs to show their face. What a distopia we live in.
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AlmaccaEveryone fruitlessly fighting the culture wars really need to learn that that's all just a distraction, and it's actually a class war, which we're losing.
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The "to minors" is a bit inflammatory. "Without any sense of discretion or propriety" is more accurate. It's not like you seed torrents for specific people. P2P just doesn't care if anyone is a minor or not, and downloading anything makes it available tl everyone anonymously. If you ever downloaded an R rated movie, you probably shared it with minors. The way it's written makes it sound intentional and predatory.
Yea, it's not good of Ars to report the shameless "think of the kids" spin uncritically.
Exactly, plus there’s no shortage of bad shit Meta has done to the youth, this is a stupid reach.
I’m just going to come out and say it: I don’t give a Kentucky fried fuck about the kids.
If a minor knows how to use bittorrent in 2025, I'm more than happy to upload R-rated movies to them. It's not like it's the biggest hurdle to overcome, but it's big enough that I trust the judgment of that young person.
I don't think it's even illegal to watch R-rated movies as a minor, it's more of a guideline for your caretakers.
I used that example because I didn't want to use the same inflammatory rhetorical concept as the article. Some countries might have regulations related to "corruption" of minors for sharing anything inappropriate with them.
I demand that Visa and Mastercard stop processing their payments immediately!
For what it's worth, a grand unified theory of Meta must include Bittorrent. The reason we have Llama is because its weights were leaked by Meta employees on 4chan and distributed via Bittorrent; going open-source was the most market-efficient way to save face. (See also previously, on Awful.) It is well-known inside lore that Facebook datacenters use Bittorrent to initialize and update machines. In the 2000s, folks used to say that Googlers look at Bayesian conditioning like classical programmers look at
if-statements; similarly, you must understand that Meta/Facebook culture looks at Bittorrent the same way that we look atscpandrsync.Isn’t it part of the lawsuit that one of the developers literally said that downloading torrents on a corporate machine feels wrong?
That they routinely use bittorrent protocol for data only makes it more willful, since they know how it works while your average Joe may not understand that he is distributing anything.
So there are some positive downstream effects of this entire bubble, huh. Didn't have this in my predictions.
We’re anti porn now?
We're anti Meta getting away with crimes that decent people of the society get fucked for.
Yes. In particular the porn that you yourself consume. You should be ashamed!