Hi all - you may have noticed this piece (https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/mumsnet-openai-sues-copyright-infringement-cz5hzvf8s) in the Times today and I wanted to explain why we're doing this.

Earlier this year, we became aware that OpenAI was scraping Mumsnet - presumably to train their large language model (LLM). Such scraping without permission is an explicit breach of our terms of use, which clearly state that no part of the site may be distributed, scraped or copied for any purpose without our express approval. So we approached Open AI and suggested they might like to licence our content. In truth there are some very good reasons why the LLMs should ingest our conversational data to train their models. The six billion plus words on Mumsnet is a unique record of twenty-four years of female conversation about everything from global politics to fashion to relationships with in-laws. By contrast the majority of the content on the web was written by and for men. AI models have misogyny baked in and we’d love to help counter the gender bias likely to be present in many of them and raise women’s voices. Their response was that they were more interested in datasets that are not easily accessible online.

Much of the content on the open web is likewise being lifted. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI pronounced only two weeks ago that machine-learning companies are perfectly within their rights to scrape content published online because the moment it’s published it becomes ‘freeware’.

You might ask why the theft of online content for model-training poses a problem - hasn’t Google been crawling all over websites and ingesting their data for search purposes since the dawn of the internet? True, but there is a clear value exchange in allowing Google to access that data, namely the resulting search traffic that comes from being indexed by Google. The LLMs are building models like ChatGPT to provide the answers to any and all prospective questions that will mean we’ll no longer need to go elsewhere for solutions. And they’re building those models with scraped content from the websites they are poised to replace.

At Mumsnet we’re in a stronger position than most because much of our traffic comes to us direct and though it’s a piece of cake for an LLM to spit out a Mumsnet-style answer to a parenting question I doubt they’ll ever be as funny about parking wars or as honest about relationships and they’ll certainly never provide the emotional support that sees around a thousand women a year helped to leave abusive partners by other Mumsnet users. But if these trillion-dollar giants are simply allowed to pillage content from online publishers - and get away with it - they will destroy many of them.

Not surprisingly, a number of large, global publishers are currently suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement and here at Mumsnet though we’re neither large (in revenue terms) nor global, we’ve decided we have no choice but to initiate a legal complaint too.

That’s not to say that A.I. is all bad of course. It plainly has the potential to advance human progress and improve our lives in multiple ways. But if the LLMs are allowed to simply steal content from publishers and communities like Mumsnet they risk destroying them. Everything that’s unique and brilliant about sites like ours will be lost, and a handful of Silicon Valley giants will be left with even more control over the world’s content and commerce.

We know that taking on a multinational giant like OpenAI, with its $3bn of revenues, is not an easy task in the face of the huge resources they’ll throw at us but this is too important an issue to simply roll over. Not just for Mumsnet but for every website you’ve ever landed on for news, advice or simply to ask if you’re being unreasonable.