British parenting hub Mumsnet has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming it violated copyright law by using its data to train its AI models, including those powering ChatGPT. It’s the first such legal action taken against OpenAI in the United Kingdom, but one of a growing number of similar cases spread internationally accusing OpenAI of illicitly scraping information for its models without permission. Mumsnet claims its forums host more than six billion words and that OpenAI employed those words to teach its AI models about parenting and related topics.
“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,” Mumsnet co-founder Justine Roberts explained in a post on the website. “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.”
