Why Would Meta Download So Much Porn?

Editor’s note: This work is part of AI Watchdog, The Atlantic’s ongoing investigation into the generative-AI industry. Amid tech companies’ ongoing efforts to vacuum up as much data as possible to train AI models, Meta has taken public posts from its own platforms, scraped massive amounts of content from the rest of the internet, and pirated millions of books to train its AI models. Now the company is being accused of downloading much more illicit material: huge volumes of porn, nonconsensual…