Taking to the stage on Day 2 of MAD//Fest London, Justine Roberts, the CEO and Founder of Mumsnet sat down with Amy Wright, Global Head of Creative Strategy at Automated Creative to give “one of the freshest perspectives”, and unpack why Mumsnet has become “the first British company to launch legal action against OpenAI.”

Setting the scene: Mumsnet, tackling AI crawlers, and legal grey areas

Holding what Justine describes as “probably the largest corpus of words written by women in English on the internet today”, Mumsnet is a platform that aims to “make parents’ lives easier, and raise women’s voices”, and it holds a lot of data and knowledge from predominantly female voices, giving it a unique and powerful stake in the “conversational data” it contains. 

Speaking on the origins of the publisher’s legal action against OpenAI, Roberts shares how after noticing that “OpenAI crawlers were crawling our website” and “taking all our content” in the first half of 2024, they opened and held extensive conversations with the organisation to discuss the possibility of licensing the content. 

When these conversations ground to a halt, as they were ‘interested in a data set that is not freely available online’, Mumsnet decided to take action. Despite having terms of use making it clear that “no one could scrape our website for commercial purposes”, Roberts shares the difficulty in navigating a legal grey area in this case, given that “no one knows what the value of that data is”, citing that “in copyright law, you can only sue for what you might have lost if you’ve been able to monetize that.”

Why marketers should be taking notice

When asked about why this should matter to the industry more broadly, Justine highlights the rise of usage of AI overviews, and the following impact on search - “a massive decline in search traffic” for publishers. On its own, this presents a challenge, however coupled with the “bots that are scraping”, the choices of how to potentially utilise their own data have “all been scraped and taken away,”

Elaborating further on the impact, Roberts shares that a future with a lack of regulation could look like: “publishers will get no referral traffic, creators will get no referral income, and they will have to stop doing what they do”, and a reduction in industry players to create “five or six big companies that own all content.”

“It will have a very deleterious effect on variety, on newness, on creativity,”.

Watch Justine’s full fireside chat session here to explore these points and more in detail and also discover:

  • How Mumsnet has been using AI, and some of the positive uses for AI
  • Greater insight into how and why AI bots are scraping content
  • What Mumsnet would look like if it began today