LEAKED: A New List Reveals Top Websites Meta Is Scraping of Copyrighted Content to Train Its AI

Submitted ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨cm0002@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.zip⁩

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/meta-facebook-tech-copyright-privacy-whistleblower

Meta has scraped data from the most-trafficked domains on the internet —including news organizations, education platforms, niche forums, personal blogs, and even revenge porn sites—to train its artificial intelligence models, according to a leaked list obtained by Drop Site News.

By scraping data from roughly 6 million unique websites, including 100,000 of the top-ranked domains, Meta has generated millions of pages of content to use for Meta’s AI-training pipeline.

The sites that Meta scrapes consist of copyrighted content, pirated content, and adult videos, some of whose content is potentially illegally obtained or recorded, as well as news and original content from prominent outlets and content publishers.

They include mainstream businesses like Getty Images, Shopify, Shutterstock, but also extreme pornographic content, including websites advertising explicit sexual content and humiliation porn that exploits teenagers.

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Comments

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keyhoh@piefed.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
If I scrape Meta's AI to develop my own, would that be fair game? I'm genuinely curious about the legality of this.

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- BrikoX@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Tehnically you would be breaking terms of service and license, but in a legal sense we don’t know if that would be enforceable. Sill hasn’t been answered by courts.
  
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- cm0002@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  So far, OpenAI, anthropic et al hasn’t sued anyone over it, but they have cut account access when it’s discovered to be used for that purpose
  
  It’s how early versions of deepseek were trained iirc, it’s called distillation
  
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mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Lemmy really hates piracy… in this specific context.

And a lot of the extreme and extremist content going into these things is just Twitter. People post all kinds of shit from all kinds of places. At what point is this like clutching pearls over what the Internet Archive has saved? They’re trying to grab anything you could see.

It’s not some hacking and exfiltration campaign. Meta’s just bad at spidering. How do you go breadth-first across the entire internet and still DDoS any particular site? You don’t decide to check every DeviantArt account, at the same time, you dolts.

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- pticrix@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  “Lemmy really hates it when a corporation murders people, yet they never say anything about individuals who kill in legitimate defense of themselves”
  
  That’s pretty much how you sound, buddy.
  
  If the AI created was really useful and made open to all freely, a different song would be sung, you know.
  
  Right now, it is simply as useful as putting gas on a fire to extinguish it.
  
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  - mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Arguments are easy when you make shit up.
    
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- BurgerBaron@piefed.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Filesharing is very different from profiting off of your mass scale piracy.
  
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  - mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Correct - only the filesharing is against the law. Training is transformative use.
    
    You can’t cram a billion images into one gigabyte. They’d be one byte each. What these models do is very different from the bootlegging you’re trying to make it sound like.
    
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- who@feddit.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Lemmy really hates piracy… in this specific context.
  
  Specifically, Lemmy hates it when corporations profit by using people’s work without permission or payment.
  
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  - mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Seeking distinctions is pretense. They’re just shuffling cards.
    
    You can ask about models made from public-domain data, and most critics will not budge an inch. Mentioning copyright is working backwards from a gut feeling. The ones who say, sure, okay, it’d be different if– - maybe they have a consistent rationale. But even some of them haven’t examined how they’d feel about this technology, if all their complaints were addressed.
    
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socialsecurity@piefed.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
And nothing is going to happen to Meta because when they take your property, the laws don't apply to them.

This is a feature of the system, it just now becoming obvious for the average peon.

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Linktank@lemmy.today ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Sounds pretty god damned illegal.

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- PostaL@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s illegal for you and me. Didn’t you get that by now?
  
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- mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Outright piracy? It’s not allowed, but it’s supposed to be a civil matter.
  
  Videos posted without permission? I don’t think the audience is liable for that.
  
  Scraping despite robots.txt? If that’s illegal for its own sake, then it’s overreaching on ‘unauthorized access.’
  
  Training on any of this? … nah, it’s probably fine.
  
  A pile of linear algebra that knows what pornography looks like does not serve the same function as any particular example. No more than one video infringes on another for the general idea of cameras pointed at naked people. Producing the same kind of thing is not infringement. (Though if it involves Shrek, the trademark people will have angry and confusing questions.)
  
  Reproducing any particular input is a failure of training. Even the Bible should be paraphrased past about Genesis 1:9. The whole idea is getting the vibe of everything we’ve ever published. Cliff notes, passable imitation of the writing style, couple passages everyone’s quoted verbatim.
  
  An encyclopedia article about a book doesn’t become illegal if we learn the author shoplifted it.
  
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