This edition covers the arrival of DeepSeek and what it means strategically and economically, Apple’s iOS 18.3 changes pausing news summaries and switching Apple Intelligence to opt-out, the wider shift among big tech firms to make AI the default rather than the upgrade, the US Copyright Office’s second report on AI and copyrightability, the UK Government’s AI and Copyright consultation alongside a Government tool that uses LLMs to analyse consultation responses, a mini-literature review on generative AI in pedagogy, and details of the AI-heavy IPG Spring Conference.

This edition covers the $500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure consortium, impending litigation between the News Media Alliance and an unnamed AI company, OpenAI’s new Operator browser agent in the US, Google’s bundling of Gemini into Workspace and the resulting privacy questions, Goldman Sachs research on small business attitudes to AI, a Nature piece on LLM hallucination rates, an AI book-recommendation app surfaced by Storythings, and personal news on an Arvon masterclass for authors and a non-executive director role at Burleigh Dodds.

This edition features stories on the UK’s national AI strategy, a study of LLMs in education, ​Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait on AI in journalism, and new features from ChatGPT and Copilot.

This edition covers Fable’s offensive AI-generated reading summaries and the lessons for publishers, Scott Belsky’s “Small Teams, Big Businesses” 2025 prediction, Google Cloud’s roundup of 300+ generative AI use cases, fresh allegations about Meta’s use of pirated books for training, an Oxford Internet Institute paper on AI’s net positive impact on employment, and a hands-on test of Avataar’s Velocity product-video tool.

For anyone taking stock of AI developments as the year turns, Simon Willison’s end-of-year roundup is phenomenally good. I recommend reading it in full as it gives a really comprehensive view of what happened and why it matters, but there are several points highlighted below which are particularly relevant to publishers.

(Originally posted on LinkedIn): Every December since 2020, I’ve posted my favourite books of the year here. It’s the biggest month of the year for book sales, many of us will catch up with reading over the holidays, and with the space for book reviews in the media shrinking, authors need all the shares they can get. Caveat: there’s no fiction here (I just haven’t read enough this year) but if the list is a little wonky in both senses of the word, I can genuinely say I enjoyed every book.

This edition covers the UK government’s consultation on copyright and AI, an Amazon job listing that hints at deeper AI use inside the Kindle reading experience, NotebookLM’s enterprise update, Apple Intelligence’s BBC misattribution, a US AI litigation tracker, and what the Betty Crocker Effect can teach us about generative AI.

This edition rounds up a packed week of tech news—OpenAI’s Sora rollout, Google’s Gemini 2 and Deep Research, and Reddit’s new AI search tool—alongside new public-domain training datasets, AI deal trackers, the impact of AI clauses in publishing contracts, and a four-part model of how organisations use AI.