Not long after it was relaunched with over 55,000 screenshots and a platter of new features, the Game UI Database hit a major roadblock.

Edd Coates, creator of the free repository, noticed the website had been "laggy as hell" and with the help of server maestro Jay Peet, started to investigate. The fix was alarmingly simple. Blocking a single IP address allowed normal service to resume, but who was the owner of that digital calling card? None other than OpenAI, the generative AI firm behind ChatGPT and Dall-E.

Coates initially shared the news on X, and slammed OpenAI's practice of scraping websites for information that can be used to train its models. The company isn't shy about this. Its website openly states its large language models are trained on three sources including "information that is publicly available on the internet." Of course, a my…