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[–] 1 point 1 year ago

That explains why llama is so spicy without a finetune...

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  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Meta get's to look up a lot of porn illegally but UK needs to show their face. What a distopia we live in.

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  • [+] 33 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    Oh good, I'm sure that's going to help combat misogyny epidemic ....

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  • 14 comments in c/technology@beehaw.org view that post
    [–] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Top notch journalism. Even today, the "legit" sites either have an "I am over 18" button at best, and in general they just block users from states with more stringent requirements. Are we really supposed to hate seeders, just because arstechnica says so?

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  • [–] 44 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    They're pointing out the double standard.

    If you seed porn, its a federal offense.

    If Meta does it, its capitalism.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    While I agree with you to a point, they didn't stop there or even bother to really make that point at all. They are escalating the seeding of porn to the willful distribution of porn to children. The fact its a corporation doing the seeding just makes for an easy target for such escalation.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago

    For research purposes, which tracker did Meta use?

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  • How funny would it be if that employee was on a different team and was torrenting for personal use and got caught up in this lol.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    So what are they doing with the data? Is this all being fed into the LLM or image generating AI to create ultra realistic porn? To what end? I don't see their endgame unless it involves sexbots.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

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

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  • This feels most likely to me.

    Meta doesn't exactly want to taint their brand image with purely sexual content being generated by their base models, so it's probably for either content classification, and/or the also likely fine-tuning of their LLMs and other generative models in reverse - that is to say, fine tuning them to not create content that is like what they're then being fed.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Meta is based for once?

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  • 14 comments in c/techtakes@awful.systems view that post
    [–] 56 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    The "to minors" is a bit inflammatory. "Without any sense of discretion or propriety" is more accurate. It's not like you seed torrents for specific people. P2P just doesn't care if anyone is a minor or not, and downloading anything makes it available tl everyone anonymously. If you ever downloaded an R rated movie, you probably shared it with minors. The way it's written makes it sound intentional and predatory.

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  • [–] 36 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I don't think it's even illegal to watch R-rated movies as a minor, it's more of a guideline for your caretakers.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    I used that example because I didn't want to use the same inflammatory rhetorical concept as the article. Some countries might have regulations related to "corruption" of minors for sharing anything inappropriate with them.

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  • [–] 46 points 1 year ago

    I demand that Visa and Mastercard stop processing their payments immediately!

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    For what it's worth, a grand unified theory of Meta must include Bittorrent. The reason we have Llama is because its weights were leaked by Meta employees on 4chan and distributed via Bittorrent; going open-source was the most market-efficient way to save face. (See also previously, on Awful.) It is well-known inside lore that Facebook datacenters use Bittorrent to initialize and update machines. In the 2000s, folks used to say that Googlers look at Bayesian conditioning like classical programmers look at if-statements; similarly, you must understand that Meta/Facebook culture looks at Bittorrent the same way that we look at scp and rsync.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    So there are some positive downstream effects of this entire bubble, huh. Didn't have this in my predictions.

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  • [–] -4 points 1 year ago (2 children)