Sue Macmillan spent her twenties in the corridors of power, watching politicians slowly wake up to the internet's existence. As head of digital for the Labour Party, she monitored website stats that showed a modest trickle of daily visitors. Then she discovered Mumsnet – a site buzzing with thousands of users posting and commenting every minute.

What makes Mumsnet different from other online communities is the deliberate way trust has been built over two and a half decades. When founder Justine Roberts first launched the site, investors weren't queuing up. The dot-com bubble had burst, and community-building looked like a risky bet.

"Thank God there wasn't a VC or some other rapacious investor involved in those early days," says Macmillan, speaking at the Emerging Tech Network event last week. "Community is a really slow burn, hard thing to build. It takes time, and investors aren't big fans of that level of patience."

That patience has paid dividends. Today, Mumsnet sees 1.5 million words of user-generated content daily. And here's where it gets particularly interesting in the AI age: 95-98 per cent of those words are written by women.

"In the absence of someone challenging me otherwise, I'm going to say we possibly have the largest corpus of text written by women in the world," says Macmillan. "In an AI world where we're worried about bias, it feels like Mumsnet's got an important part to play."

This vast trove of authentic women voices has become the foundation for one of Mumsnet's most innovative projects. Within six months of ChatGPT's launch in November 2022, the team had built "MumsGPT"........

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