Meta Claims Downloaded Porn at Center of AI Lawsuit Was for ‘Personal Use’

Further, that alleged activity cannot even be reliably linked to any Meta employee, Meta claims.

Strike 3 “does not identify any of the individuals who allegedly used these Meta IP addresses, allege that anyone was employed by Meta or had any role in AI training at Meta, or specify whether (and which) content downloaded was used to train any particular Meta model,” Meta wrote.

Meanwhile, “thousands of employees,” as well as “countless contractors, visitors and third parties access the Internet every day,” Meta argued. So while “likely one or more Meta employees” downloaded Strike 3 content over the past seven years, “it’s just as possible” that a “guest, or freeloader,” or “contractor, or vendor, or repair person—or some combination of such persons—was responsible for that activity,” Meta claims.

Other alleged activity included a claim that a Meta contractor was ordered to download adult content at his father’s house, but those downloads, too, were “clearly indicative of personal spending,” Meta argued. That contractor worked as an “automation engineer,” Meta noted, with no apparent basis why he would be expected to dedicate AI training data to that role. “No data plausibly “ties” Meta to those downloads,” Meta claims.

“The torrenting allegedly ceased after the termination of its contract with Meta, which says nothing about whether the alleged torrenting was carried out with Meta’s knowledge or at its direction,” Meta wrote.

Meta AI condemns training theory as “absurd”.

Perhaps most surprising to Meta in the Strike 3 allegations, however, is the claim about a “stealth network” of hidden IPs. This presents “yet another problem” that Strike 3 “fails to address,” Meta claims, writing, “Why would Meta want to ‘hide’ some alleged downloads of Plaintiffs’ and third-party content, but use easily traceable Meta corporate IP addresses for many others?”

“The obvious answer is that it won’t,” Meta claimed, slamming Strike 3’s “entire AI training theory” as “absurd and unsupported.”