(Image via: Roblox)
Independent 3D modeling community Open3DLab shared a blog post where it alleged that a crawler that “belonged to Roblox walked through almost every project on Open3DLab, SFMLab and SmutBase, and proceeded to download complete copies of 1,027 files from 712 projects. 145.5 GB of our creators’ work, downloaded for what we assume are AI training purposes”. The crawler used trellis2-data-sourcing/1.0 (3D foundation model research; [redacted]@roblox.com) as its user agent, with the data coming from a single Amazon AWS address. It had read the main page of 18,926 projects, which is practically the 3D modeling community’s entire catalogue, in 26,429 requests over a span of 34 hours. After pulling the project pages, it downloaded complete copies of 1,027 files from 712 projects, 145.5 GB in all, before suspending operations during the weekend. The downloads include 364 files (54.8 GB) from 224 projects on SmutBase, which hosts adult content only. With the SFMLab projects marked adult, 345 of the 712 projects (62.6 GB) are adult content.
Kids gaming platform Roblox has been accused of scrapping 145GB of 3D files for training artificial intelligence (AI). “We want to be careful here. We don’t think Roblox set out to collect adult content, and we have no evidence that any of it reached a model or a product. The scrapes were likely automated. But that is exactly the problem: as far as our logs show, nobody checked. A crawler working for a company whose platform tens of millions of children use was pointed at an adult site, and it took explicit models without telling them apart from anything else,” the blog post reads. It came from a single Amazon Web Services (AWS) address.