AI could be an existential threat to publishers – that’s why Mumsnet is fighting back | Justine Roberts

There is nothing wrong with mining content for data, but it has to be properly regulated and creators must be compensated

• Justine Roberts is the CEO of Mumsnet

After nearly 25 years as a founder of Mumsnet, I considered myself pretty unshockable when it came to the workings of big tech. But my jaw hit the floor last week when I read that Google was pushing to overhaul UK copyright law in a way that would allow it to freely mine other publishers' content for commercial gain without compensation.

At Mumsnet, we've been on the sharp end of this practice, and have recently launched the first British legal action against the tech giant OpenAI. Earlier in the year, we became aware that it was scraping our content - presumably to train its large language model (LLM). Such scraping without permission is a breach of copyright laws and explicitly of our terms of use, so we approached OpenAI and suggested a licensing deal. After lengthy talks (and signing a non-disclosure agreement), it told us it wasn't interested, saying it was after less open" data sources.