Meta lands in legal trouble over controversial AI training practices

Meta has landed in legal trouble as two adult film companies file a lawsuit against tech giant, claiming to illegally train artificial intelligence (AI) over 2,000 adult movies content.

According to Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media, Meta has been intentionally violating the copyrights of 2,396 movies since 2018.

The lawsuit against Facebook parent company was filed in California on Friday, August 22. The both production companies are seeking compensatory damages worth $359 million.

The lawsuit reads that “Meta willingly downloaded the movies from pirate sources for purposes of acquiring content to train its Meta Movie Gen, Large Language Model (LLaMA) and other Meta AI models that rely on video training content.”

These plaintiffs also accused the tech company of alleged efforts to cash in on BitTorrent transfers’ “tit-for-tat” algorithm.

By using this algorithm, the users are rewarded for sharing content with others by making download speed faster.

The complaint further says, “Meta made the deliberate choice to seed Plaintiffs’ motion pictures in order to capitalize on faster download speeds so it could infringe other content faster.”

The litigants further made claims about the Meta’s acknowledgement of this issue of copyright violation.

Moreover, Meta has also been sued by various authors over the infringement of content without permission.

Till now, Meta has not responded to the lawsuit, as reported by The Independent.

According to TorrentFreak, Strike 3 is the most active copyright litigant in all of the United States. The film company has also sued BitTorrent pirates for stealing the movies and sharing them online for free without consent.