Justine Roberts

Justine Roberts (born 1967) is a former sports journalist and investment banker who co-founded Mumsnet in 2000 after a disastrous family holiday convinced her parents needed a place to swap honest advice. It grew into the UK’s largest parenting community — millions of users and, by Mumsnet’s count, more than six billion words of forum posts.

Britain’s first case against OpenAI

In 2024, after discovering evidence its forums had been scraped to train ChatGPT, Mumsnet approached OpenAI to license its archive. OpenAI declined. Roberts then launched what was reported as the first British legal action of its kind against the company, arguing the scraping breached Mumsnet’s terms of use, which forbid copying “for any purpose without our express approval.”

Roberts frames the fight as existential for the open web, not just for her company. If large language models “are allowed to simply steal and repurpose content from publishers and communities like Mumsnet,” she warned, “they risk destroying them” — leaving “a handful of Silicon Valley giants … with even more control over the world’s content and commerce.”

She is not a blanket AI opponent — Mumsnet has experimented with AI features itself — but insists the human community is irreplaceable: an LLM, she quipped, will never be “as funny about parking wars or as honest about relationships.” Her case joins a wave of publisher and author actions, from The New York Times to the Authors Guild, testing whether training on copyrighted web content is lawful.