Summary
Court records in an ongoing lawsuit reveal that Meta staff allegedly downloaded 81.7TB of pirated books from shadow libraries like Z-Library and LibGen to train its AI models.
Internal messages show employees raising ethical concerns, with one saying, “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”
Meta reportedly took steps to hide the activity.
The case is part of a broader debate on AI data sourcing, with similar lawsuits against OpenAI and Nvidia.
So long as we’re not just singling out Meta. They’ve all done it.
At least Meta, with its Llama model family, has enabled the open source LLM space to flourish (along with Mistral, AI2, Alibaba, Eleuther, and many others).
What-aboutism. I know. I’m okay with what’s happening here in the sense that in return we’ve gotten magical (compared to the SoTA five years ago) models with seemingly emergent reasoning capabilities and expertise in basically every domain. That’s huge, even if it’s started to feel normal.
The issue, of course, is creatives whose content was stolen now losing out on opportunities or revenue that they relied on, meaning fewer creatives in the future and more AI slop.
Not seeding is hilariously on-brand for Meta though. Maybe it’s the ‘possession < distribution’ defence?
They have to single out Meta for the narrative to work. Objectively, this is about major content owners, corporations, wanting a piece of something other people have created. That’s a tough sell, so you have to spin a story.
Sorta. AI training is clear-cut fair use, which is why you get manipulative stories like this one. What exactly do these out-of-context quotes say about the law? Nothing, but it serves the narrative.
Actually seeding the content is problematic. If you knew that the downloaders had some legal purpose, that might work. But just sharing it is hard to justify.
Yes, we know: the law is carefully crafted so that it’s only illegal if WE do it.
Yeah, that’s one of the slogans they use to manipulate you. It’s like the one going around before elections. Both parties are the same and so an outsider is needed, like Trump. How’s that working out for the US right now?