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.