They're pointing out the double standard.

If you seed porn, its a federal offense.

If Meta does it, its capitalism.

Ars Technica is not asserting that themselves, that's the argument that Strike3 is making. Strike3 and other porn companies attack non-professional porn on these grounds as well, to try to kill their competition.

Pure speculation: ;possibly to identify sexual nudity and "inappropriate" content as some kind of legitimate usecase. What was actually done, I have no idea.

Let's be honest now... Zuckerberg is building a globally-distributed, industrial-scale, disaster-proof spank bank for himself.

A lot of artists will practice anatomy by drawing people nude, largely because it’s hard to get a good understanding of anatomy by only drawing people with clothes on.

If you wanted to put some examples of bare human anatomy in odd positions to expand the range that the model is capable of, well there aren’t many larger corpuses of that than porn.

Also, even if they don’t want it to make explicit content, they probably want it to make “suggestive” or “appealing” content. And they just assume they can guide rail it away from making actual explicit content. Although that’s probably pretty short sighted given how weak guardrails really are.

Well, Stable Diffusion 3 supposedly purposefully removed all porn from their training and negatively trained the model on porn and it apparently destroyed the model's ability to generate proper anatomy.

Regardless, image generation models need some porn in training to at least know what porn is so that they know what porn is not.

It's part of a process called regularization, or preventing any particular computational model from over-fitting.

Well, there's also censorbots.

Yea, it's not good of Ars to report the shameless "think of the kids" spin uncritically.

If you ever downloaded an R rated movie, you probably shared it with minors.

If a minor knows how to use bittorrent in 2025, I'm more than happy to upload R-rated movies to them. It's not like it's the biggest hurdle to overcome, but it's big enough that I trust the judgment of that young person.

Isn’t it part of the lawsuit that one of the developers literally said that downloading torrents on a corporate machine feels wrong?

That they routinely use bittorrent protocol for data only makes it more willful, since they know how it works while your average Joe may not understand that he is distributing anything.

We're anti Meta getting away with crimes that decent people of the society get fucked for.

Yes. In particular the porn that you yourself consume. You should be ashamed!

Easy just get a job at meta and you apparently have access to all the porn you want