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.
Thinking it’s only about the LLMs is pretty reductive, though I guess it makes for an easily digestible statement.
We don’t ask people to be mad about the tool, it’s about how we’re being told The Tool is the most important human endeavor, while the mass usage of The Tool has yet to prove more worthwhile than having a chat with a friend, all the while we create a lot of ethical, ecological and economical debt in order to keep evolving The Tool, and funneling most of the products of that debt into the hands of people who already have more than enough.
So The Tool as of yet has had way more negative direct and side effects, by the combined effect of its (mis)use, its Herculean development and the massive, global pitch sale effort invested in deploying it to ubiquity, than any projected positive outcomes that comes out of the mass deployment and usage of The Tool.
It has its very specialized used. It should have remained in the labs and backends where it belongs.
This is what - to me, one of the Luddite who would rather stop this cancer from growing - we are mad about, and why, given the scale of things at this moment and what is projected, think people should be more in the know of the revolting realities that are not said in all those nice press releases and consumer expos.