Consider any subject vaguely associated to elevating children possible, and there’s in all probability a submit about it on Mumsnet, the long-running, enormously standard, controversy-spurring UK-based parenting discussion board for moms. Over its greater than two decade-long historical past, Mumsnet has amassed an archive of greater than six billion phrases written by its extremely engaged person base, on subjects akin to soiled diapers and lazy husbands. (To not point out a bonkers rant about dolphins.)
This spring, after Mumsnet found that AI corporations have been scraping its information, the corporate says it determined to attempt to strike licensing offers with among the main gamers within the area, together with OpenAI, which initially expressed willingness to discover an association after Mumsnet first reached out. After talks with OpenAI fell aside, Mumsnet in July introduced its intention to pursue legal action.
Based on Mumsnet, throughout these early conversations, an OpenAI strategic partnership lead informed the corporate that datasets over 1 billion phrases have been of curiosity to the AI big. Mumsnet’s management was excited. “We spent fairly a while in a back-and-forth with them,” Mumsnet founder and CEO Justine Roberts tells WIRED. “We needed to signal some NDAs, and so they wished numerous data from us.”
Nevertheless, over a month later, OpenAI informed Mumsnet that the corporate was now not desirous about partnering at the moment, in accordance with an e-mail change reviewed by WIRED. When requested why, the OpenAI staffer characterised Mumsnet’s 6 billion phrase dataset as too small to warrant a licensing association, Roberts says. Additionally they famous that OpenAI is primarily desirous about massive datasets that the general public can’t already entry on-line, and that it wished datasets that captured broad human expertise.
This sentiment was echoed by the corporate when requested for remark from WIRED. “We pursue partnerships for large-scale datasets that mirror human society and don’t pursue partnerships solely for publicly accessible data,” says OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wooden. “We assist writer and creator selection, providing them methods to precise their preferences about how their websites and content material work with AI in search outcomes and coaching generative AI basis fashions.”
Roberts says she was “irritated” by this improvement. She recollects that OpenAI at first had appeared particularly desirous about Mumsnet due to the platform’s closely female-written content material. “It’s very high-quality conversational information,” she says. “It’s 90 p.c feminine dialog, which is sort of uncommon.”
OpenAI has struck a wide range of data-licensing offers with media retailers and platforms previously 12 months, getting into into agreements with Vox Media, the Atlantic, Axel Springer, Time, and WIRED mum or dad firm Condé Nast, in addition to platforms crammed with user-generated content material like Reddit. (Automattic, the proprietor of WordPress.com and Tumblr, was additionally stated to be in licensing talks earlier this 12 months.) Because the particulars of these offers haven’t been revealed, it’s not clear what the scale of their respective corpuses are.
When WIRED requested concerning the measurement of datasets it’ll take into account for industrial licensing, OpenAI declined to share that data. However spokesperson Kayla Wooden emphasizes that the corporate’s partnerships with publishers are “targeted on displaying their content material in our merchandise and driving site visitors to them.”
