AI companies claim their tools couldn’t exist without training on copyrighted material. It turns out, they could and it just takes more work. To prove it, AI researchers trained a model on a dataset that uses only public domain and openly licensed material.
What makes it difficult is curating the data, but once the data has been curated once, in principle everyone can use it without having to go through the painful part. So the whole “we have to violate copyright and steal intellectual property” is (as everybody already knew) total BS.
Fuck copyrights though.
Indeed, intellectual property laws exist to concentrate ownership and profit in the hands of corporations, not to protect individual artists. Disney’s ruthless copyright enforcement, for instance, sharply contrasts with its own history of mining public-domain stories. Meanwhile, OpenAI scraping data at scale, it exposes the hypocrisy of a system that privileges corporate IP hoarding over collective cultural wealth. Large corporations can ignore copyright without being held to account while regular people cannot. In practice, copyright helps capitalists far more than it help individual artists.
“openly licensed” material is still copyrighted though
Also: copying is not theft, stealing a thing leaves one less left, copying it makes one thing more, that’s what copying’s for… 🎶 🎵
but it is it good
the result? It performed about as well as Meta’s similarly sized Llama 2-7B from 2023.
