Copyright news18
Meta’s AI journey has come across an intriguing juncture as multiple companies have accused the company of illegally downloading movies with explicit content and did so to train their AI models. In fact, these companies, Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media have filed a lawsuit worth $359 million for downloading over 2,000 of their movies via torrent seeds and asked them to reply and act on these allegations. Meta claims the movies were downloaded but not to train the AI, but for personal use. Yes, this is not a prank, the company has actually admitted to its employees downloading illegal content, probably on its high-speed network, to watch for their own purpose. Hard To Believe The lawsuit is big not only for the figures mentioned but also the context of what Meta seems to be resorting to for its own AI ambitions that are big. The case even cites around 47 IP addresses that link to Meta employees, and Strike 3 seems to have done its homework before taking the legal recourse. The funny thing is that downloading explicit content for personal use itself is illegal in many countries and Meta is openly admitting to these actions, because it wants to hide the bigger evil of the two which is linked to AI training. The other concern is that using content of this genre hints at a bigger play with adult-centric AI chatbots, something that OpenAI is also bringing with ChatGPT for users in December this year. The lawsuit is a signal that entertainment companies are tracking these giants and making sure they don’t get a free ride with their AI evolution, minting billions while leaving others dry. Meta Responds Meta says that downloading 22 movies per year is not enough to train AI videos, which might have some value but the overall situation puts the company and many others in further spotlight of content makers who are extremely worried about how the freely available data becomes AI-generated in the near future. Erotica content is going to become prevalent in the next few months, not only because of OpenAI but Elon Musk’s Grok is also likely to push the ante in the area and it sounds like Meta is slowly gaining ground on them to make its own mark.
