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This edition marks a year of the newsletter and covers Thad McIlroy on publishing’s slow technology adoption, fresh disclosure in the OpenAI authors’ lawsuit, Getty’s largely lost UK case against Stability AI, an unusually swift Universal/Udio settlement plus partnership, Amazon’s lawsuit against Perplexity over agentic shopping and Perplexity’s response, Canva’s relaunch as a Creative Operating System, Sage’s new pedagogy white paper by Tom Chatfield, Nadim Sadek’s book Quiver Don’t Quake, John Wiley’s new author and journal AI guidelines, fresh research on how AI disclosure affects reader trust, and Overdrive bringing AI recommendations to Libby.
I sent the first of these newsletters a year ago this week, to twenty-seven friends and colleagues. Since then, it’s grown to over 1,500 readers and has become one of the highlights of my work. The cadence of researching and publishing weekly keeps me up to date before I hit send, and I really value all of the comments and connections that have come from it. Thank you for your time and attention, and I hope you’ll stay with me for another year. Thad McIlroy has an excellent, thought-provoking piece on the publishing industry and technology adoption, using the slow take-up of ONIX 3.0 as a frame to ask, what if publishing is equally dilatory in adopting AI. Thad evidences his argument in part with the absence of AI requirements in current job listings—to back up that argument, I looked at a number of open roles at UK publishers that talk a good game on AI, and even in technology-forward areas such as digital marketing and analytics, there’s not a mention of AI skills… Authors and publishers suing OpenAI have gained access to internal company discussions on the use and deletion of books from LibGen, which could be seen as destruction of evidence. The plaintiffs are a long way from their day in court, let alone damages or an Anthropic-type settlement, but it’s not a stretch to imagine that as an outcome. Getty Images largely lost its UK lawsuit against Stability AI. The court found only limited, historic trademark infringement relating to Getty watermarks and rejected secondary copyright claims. For rights holders, the UK still lacks a definitive legal position on whether training AI models on copyrighted works is infringement—meaning policy developments and future cases will likely shape the landscape more than this ruling. One of the fundamental challenges for publishers in the last year has been balancing practical opportunities from AI with litigation over use of content in training. Litigation requires confrontational positioning, but companies have to be careful not to box themselves into a corner. That said, I’m not sure I’ve seen anything quite as quick-footed as Universal Music announcing the settlement of litigation and a strategic partnership with the opposing party in the same press release… Amazon filed a new lawsuit against AI platform Perplexity for allowing its AI agents to shop on behalf of users (Amazon is, of course, developing similar functionality itself). Perplexity responded with an understated argument that this is a threat to all internet users. For publishers who are grappling with issues of AI agents accessing information, it’s a small foretaste of the bigger arguments when agents are transacting with websites. Separately, on a more practical note, Perplexity published a new set of guidelines on AI in the workplace, built around its own tools but with some useful general advice on prompts and capabilities for any AI user. Slate uses recent discussions between local history publisher Arcadia and its authors as the starting point for a piece on publisher licensing to AI companies. Besides providing general context, it’s also helpful in highlighting the opacity of a lot of licensing deals and other friction points for authors. A week after a series of largely incremental product updates from Adobe, Canva announced a complete overhaul of its product line, now described as a Creative Operating System. AI tools are present throughout, including a proprietary design model, integration with LLMs and AI-powered analytics for marketing campaigns. And Affinity, the InDesign competitor acquired by Canva last year, is being made free in perpetuity (and has been downloaded over a million times in less than a week). Overall, this looks like a really compelling alternative to Creative Suite for publishing design and marketing teams. For academic and educational readers, Sage published a new white paper by Tom Chatfield on AI and the future of pedagogy. It strikes a good balance of highlighting issues and opportunities, particularly the potential for AI to be a guided learning partner, not merely a source of content. Anyone developing courseware and textbooks could get a lot from it. On that theme of AI as partner not replacement, belated thanks to Shimmr founder Nadim Sadek for sending me a copy of his excellent new book, Quiver, don’t Quake, a combination of philosophical musing and practical guidelines on AI and creativity. It made for a thought-provoking return journey from New York last week. John Wiley published a new set of guidelines on the use of AI for journal authors, editors and peer reviewers. This complements their earlier guidelines for book authors, which I’ve often held up as the gold standard for publisher policy and communications. Both sets of guidelines are essential reading and Wiley has done the entire ecosystem a service by making them publicly available. It would be good to see other publishers being similarly proactive (if your publisher has a set of guidelines, let me know and I’ll share it). The Wiley guidelines underpin clarity and transparency on where AI is being used, which seem essential principles. But there’s a tension in this: new research suggests that readers’ perceptions of content shift when they are made aware of AI involvement, with lower levels of trust and engagement—though this is offset when readers have greater levels of AI literacy. To be clear, I do not think anyone should take this as justification to obscure AI use, but it’s a reminder that AI remains a nuanced and contested topic. Overdrive recently added an AI book curation and recommendation feature to its library app Libby: in this interview, CEO Steve Potash discusses the feature, dealing with user scepticism, and whether it can help to arrest the decline in reading.
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