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.

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.