Context Window 76
Greetings from Portland, where I’m writing this on the Thursday of IBPA Publishing University—or, as my body clock is telling me, about 0...
Posts and Newsletters
Building AI Workflows That Survive Platform Risk
AI platform volatility, pricing changes, usage limits, makes it risky to build workflows inside specific models. The smartest users are using AI as a harness, keeping data and value in their own stack. Optionality matters as much as optimisation.
Context Window 75
It was a quieter week for product releases, but there were significant legal, policy and research developments. I am in Portland, Oregon ...
How AI Affects Publishing Depends on Existing Incentives
New Australian research frames AI training on creative work as a market failure. But economic analysis needs segmentation: AI may cause underproduction in literary publishing while driving overproduction in academic sectors where volume is rewarded.
Context Window 74
Happy Friday. I’m catching up after a week on the road and there is a lot to process. This week my reading and thinking clustered around ...
Prompter's Intent
Why GPT-5.5's prompting advice echoes 19th-century military doctrine: the shift from scripting tasks to creating conditions for delegated work to succeed.
ECPA Conference Reflections
Reflections from the ECPA Leadership Summit on AI's impact on publishing. Bob Hutchins' proxy failure framework - how AI undermines trust in writing as a signal of thought and effort - connects to George Akerlof's market for lemons: when quality signals break down, adverse selection can collapse markets. The strategic question for publishers is whether they can credibly signal editorial judgement in ways that are costly for low-quality producers to fake.
Context Window 73
It’s been a big couple of weeks for AI image generation and design tools: with major updates from Canva, Google and Anthropic, users are ...