Meta: Pirated Adult Film Downloads Were for "personal Use," Not AI Training
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Meta claims that pirated adult film downloads were for 'personal use' and not for AI training, sparking skepticism and debate among commenters about the company's intentions and practices.
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Alternately require employees to use a dirty-net VPN to view porn or whatever edgy / taboo content so it does not even come from meta allocated networks but is still routed through their security devices. As apposed to the consumer commercial VPN's in the spirit of preserving the "top-10 porn viewer awards. If anyone asks about the dirty net VPN it is for researching malware, ransomware and sites posing as meta/fb.
In fact I don’t really buy their reasoning - surely everyone working as a software engineer knows that SNIs are unencrypted and any corporate network will log them, so nobody should be accessing any kind of objectionable content via the corporate network for their own good to avoid embarrassment.
So I suspect the porn access may have been due to an actual AI scraper (not arguing that they trained on porn - it could very well be there are 2 stages - one is a basic scraper more or less following links, including accidentally following a pornographic link posted on a non-porn site, and another stage classifies the content and the decides whether it should be used for training or discarded).
If this was actually employees accessing or torrenting pornographic content, I’d expect this to be quickly followed up on and the employee facing dismissal after a stern warning (or an IT security investigation if they persevere in claiming they didn’t do it, as it could suggest malware using their machine to proxy traffic).
Whether they trained on it is another matter. I suspect that due to the prevalence of porn on the internet there would be incentives to filter out such content (if anything, just because it’s quantity would outweigh the non-porn content) for model training.
Not exactly scraper-level downloading.
Do they have a statistic how much they "used" them ? Would be nice to know what kind of adult films Meta "employees" prefer ? BSDM ? Shemale ? Lesbian ? Gay ? /s