Meta claims the downloaded porn at the center of the AI lawsuit was for “personal use.”
Furthermore, Meta claims that the alleged activity cannot even be reliably linked to any Meta employees.
“It does not identify any of the individuals who allegedly used these Meta IP addresses, claim that any of them were employed by Meta or had a role in training AI at Meta, or specify whether (and which) content allegedly downloaded was used to train any particular Meta model,” Meta wrote.
Meanwhile, Metta argued that “tens of thousands of employees” as well as “countless contractors, visitors and third parties access the Internet at Metta every day.” So, while it’s “likely that 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 “a contractor, or vendor, or repairer—or any combination of those—was responsible for that activity.”
Other alleged activity included an allegation that a Meta contractor was directed to download adult content at his father’s home, but Meta argued that those downloads also “clearly represent personal consumption.” Meta noted that the contractor was working as an “automation engineer,” without providing a specific basis for why he was expected to prepare AI training data in that role. Meta claims that “no facts plausibly link Meta to those downloads”.
“The fact that torrenting allegedly ceased upon the termination of his contract with Meta does nothing to determine whether the alleged torrenting was done with or at the direction of Meta,” Metta wrote.
Meta calls AI training theory “pointless”.
However, probably most confusing to the meta in the Strike 3 lawsuit is the alleged “secret network” of hidden IPs. Meta claims that it presents “another mystery” that Strike 3 “can’t address,” “why Meta seeks to hide some alleged downloads of complainants and third-party content, but uses Meta’s easily traceable corporate IP addresses for hundreds of others?”
“The obvious answer is that it doesn’t,” claims Meta, criticizing Strike 3’s “entire AI training theory” as “nonsensical and unsupported.”
