Context Window 52
This edition covers Spotify’s new AI-generated audiobook Recaps feature and what that integration means for authors who want to opt out, an Authors Alliance piece on whether AI summaries might count as infringing derivative works, ElevenLabs’ new marketplace of “legendary voices”, Netflix’s generative-AI production guidelines as a model for publisher policy, Google’s new File Search RAG tool and a refreshed NotebookLM, Time magazine’s full-stack AI agent, and Helen King’s interview with the founder of AI content management platform Cashmere.
Hello from Dublin, where I’ve been speaking at the Publishing Ireland conference. It’s been a really excellent day and good to see many subscribers and friends here. The big theme this week is AI developments from Big Media: new features and guidelines from Spotify, Netflix and Time all have implications and lessons for publishers of all sizes. Spotify has introduced a new feature called Recaps, which uses AI to generate a short narrative reminder for listeners when they come back to an audiobook after a while. The carefully worded announcement states clearly that book content is not used for LLM training—though it seems likely that it is processed by an LLM for generation, even if the data isn’t retained or used to train the model. Functionally, this is similar to Amazon’s recent Story So Far feature. There are two immediate implications for publishers. With two of the leading retail platforms offering this feature, similar functionality is likely to come to other reading systems. Second, the tight integration of AI into core platform functionality shows how difficult it is becoming to accommodate requests from authors who want to avoid any AI use associated with their work. Generation of summaries is also the focus of this opinion piece from the Authors Alliance, which highlights an implication of the recent court ruling in the OpenAI class action: that certain short summaries of fictional works might, in some circumstances, be interpreted as infringing derivative works. This isn’t an issue for Spotify or Amazon, who work directly with rights holders, but the piece speculates about potential risks for platforms like Wikipedia. AI audio platform ElevenLabs has launched a new marketplace for ‘legendary voices’, synthetic versions of leading figures such as Maya Angelou, Michael Caine, Laurence Olivier and Judy Garland for text-to-speech applications. Most of the featured voices are no longer dead, with relatively few contemporary figures. It will be interesting to see whether more living rights holders choose to participate, given the varying legal frameworks around voice likeness and posthumous rights. Netflix has published a set of guidelines for the use of generative AI in creative applications, which is a useful thought starter for publishers. What’s particularly relevant is the thinking on ethics and how AI works with creative workflows and third party intellectual property. Ideally publishers should have policy documents that are internally facing like this one, and for key external partners like authors (as in the Wiley examples last week). Google has introduced a new retrieval augmented generation (RAG) functionality to the Google Gemini API. Put simply, the new File Search tool allows Gemini to interact with your own repository of files rather than relying solely on its general training data and web search. This is priced aggressively at $0.15 per million tokens (roughly 5-6 non-fiction books). Google has also introduced a series of improvements to one of my favourite AI tools, NotebookLM, including a Deep Research model and better integration with PDFs and other files in Google Drive. This makes it significantly more useful as a research tool. As an example of a really expansive publisher AI strategy, Time magazine has introduced an AI Agent offering interactivity, summaries, translation and audio versions alongside its reporting. Helen King’s PubTech Radar has an interview with Jonathan Woahn, the founder of AI content management platform Cashmere, which sits between publishers and AI companies. It’s all useful context, but the key takeaway for me is that publishers can either engage with licensing and shape how it works, or watch it happen to them.
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