This edition covers Google’s new AI Mode Search and what it means for publisher referral traffic, Mistral OCR as a low-cost tool for digitising older documents, Canva’s State of Marketing and AI benchmarks, Lisa Nandy’s reassurances on creative-industries support at the Creative UK summit, the Authors Alliance submission to the UK AI and copyright consultation, an argument that fears of AI replacing human writing are overstated, and a note ahead of London Book Fair.

This edition covers a busy week at the IPG Conference and a striking Ethan Mollick chart on AI’s collapsing cost and rising performance, Amazon’s Alexa+ upgrade and what agentic shopping means for book discoverability, an HBR piece on AI agents reshaping consumer behaviour, ElevenLabs’ new ElevenReader Publishing offer for synthetic-voice audiobooks, Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s switchable reasoning mode, the arrival of GPT 4.5, and the UK launch of OpenAI’s Sora video generator.

(Originally published on LinkedIn): Like many people in publishing, I’ve been formulating a response to the UK Government’s Consultation on AI and Copyright. With many leading industry and advocacy groups encouraging contributions, it seems likely there will be a big response. So I was interested to read last week that one of the projects developed by the Government’s Incubator for Artificial Intelligence is a tool to use AI to analyse the results of large public consultations.

This edition covers The Guardian’s licensing deal with OpenAI alongside the New York Times rolling out internal AI tools, reflections from a BookNet Canada Q&A on how publisher questions are shifting from theory to practice, the limits of OpenAI and Perplexity’s Deep Research products, the ElevenLabs/Spotify audiobook partnership against Audible’s stance on AI narration, Descript’s new Custom GPT, and concerns about the UK Government using an AI tool to analyse its own AI and Copyright consultation responses.

Last September, BookNet Canada invited me to speak at their Tech Forum webinar on the use of AI in publishing. Looking back at my slides, it’s remarkable how much the world has moved on since then, though the eight principles I set out have held up pretty well.

I was invited to deliver a short webinar today for the Swedish Publishers Association and its international affiliates. It was great to see a very strong turnout and thank you to my hosts for arranging it. I talked about recent trends in AI, how publishers are approaching it, and examples of how AI tools are being used.

This edition covers the fractious end to the Paris AI Action Summit and Mistral’s new Le Chat, OpenAI’s plan to unify its product line into GPT-5, Adobe’s commercially-safe Firefly Video Model, a Thomson Reuters fair-use ruling against an AI competitor and the Authors Alliance critique of it, the rise of AI-enabled “personal software”, Matt Webb on agentic AI and Model Context Protocol, and a practical tip for getting ChatGPT and Claude to write in British English.

This edition covers Adam Hyde’s hands-on demonstration of OpenAI’s Operator agent for research publishing workflows, the unredacted Meta court documents alleging the torrenting of more than 80TB of pirated ebooks, Amazon’s bet on automated reasoning to suppress AI hallucinations, the proliferation of Gemini 2.0 model variants and what model fragmentation means for non-expert users, and a write-up from Jellyfish on building AI agents inside creative agencies.