This edition covers Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke’s AI-first hiring memo, a behavioural study suggesting reader preferences for human authorship are weaker than stated, an argument that AI may improve content quality by writing for the model as well as the reader, Anthropic’s launch of Claude for Education with Socratic prompting, a salutary LSE blog on “efficient inefficiency”, OpenAI’s persistent-memory upgrade to ChatGPT and the Temporary Chat workaround, Meta’s Llama 4 multimodal models, and a court ruling allowing the New York Times’s copyright case against OpenAI to proceed.

This edition covers Amazon’s new Nova Act browser-agent model, Google’s Gemini 2.5 reasoning model, Rachel Coldicutt’s responsible-AI dos and don’ts, fresh CLA research showing 82% of UK professionals upload third-party content into AI prompts, FT analysis on the limited employment impact of AI so far, Tyler Cowen on AI in his writing workflow, a Nature piece on AI and academic peer review, and new data points on AI scraping bots overwhelming publisher infrastructure.

This edition covers OpenAI’s inline image generation in 4o and the Studio Ghibli controversy that followed, a US court’s refusal to halt Anthropic’s training on song lyrics and what that means for publisher litigation strategy, a new world map of AI copyright lawsuits, MIT Tech Review on the dangers of total autonomy for AI agents, OUP’s AI Discovery Assistant with Silverchair, the worsening impact of AI crawlers on open access infrastructure and Cloudflare’s response, and a BookBrunch op-ed on AI in bookselling.

This edition covers Meta’s attempt to block Sarah Wynn Williams’s memoir Careless People and The Atlantic’s forensic exposé of Meta’s training data, the billion-download milestone for Llama, attitudes to AI among Ibero-American publishers from a trip to Madrid’s Parix IA conference, the Thaler v. Perlmutter appellate ruling reaffirming that copyright requires human authorship, Y Combinator’s report on AI-generated startup code, Baidu’s aggressively priced Ernie models, Anthropic adding web search to Claude, OpenAI’s updated voice models, Zoom’s new AI agents, and details of a forthcoming Publishing Scotland webinar.

This edition covers OpenAI’s “freedom-focused” pitch to the Trump administration on AI policy, an FOI revealing Peter Kyle’s use of ChatGPT for policy advice, Wiley’s gold-standard author AI guidelines, Adam Hyde’s open-source EasyJournal and the wider rise of AI-assisted “vibe coding”, time spent with Ukrainian publishers and the threat of AI training on Russian propaganda, an HBR piece on responsible AI, Sakana’s AI-generated paper passing peer review, OpenAI’s new Responses API for building agents, and AI’s growing role in commissioning decisions across creative industries.

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.