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Happy Friday. Thanks to Robin Sloan for mentioning the newsletter this week, and welcome to everyone who subscribed as a result. In recen...
Newsletter
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It’s been a quiet week for AI in publishing, though the authenticity questions I wrote about last week are rumbling on. Thanks to Thad Mc...
How I Use AI
With a book coming out later this year and (at the time of writing) nearly 100,000 words of posts and newsletters on this website, I am g...
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Provenance and authenticity are the story this week: hyped books facing questions about authorship, alongside new research and regulation...
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To quote a classic film: show me the money… This week, the approval of the Bartz v. Anthropic settlement made that a promise for many pub...
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It’s been hard to ignore significant legal and policy developments for AI and publishing in recent days, with a major new class action la...
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It’s been a long, hot week on the road, seeing publishers in Dublin, Cambridge and London. Lots of the conversations were about choosing ...
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It’s been another busy week: attending British IP Day at Parliament and the Publishers’ Licensing Service conference, and getting ready f...
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There are twin themes this week: administrative convenience in tools you are already using like Slack and Excel, and more ways for creato...
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This week there is a tight cluster of stories around how AI companies access content, what that is doing to publishers, and the economic ...
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A shorter update this week: seven presentations and workshops in ten days have left me genuinely tired, but they’ve also been the best ki...
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There are two big themes this week: what new AI agents are making possible, and the need for a more nuanced discussion of AI’s impact on ...
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This week’s newsletter focuses on the economics of AI becoming more visible. Sometimes that’s positive for publishers: a new tool for est...
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It’s been a week of jet lag, catch-up and presentations, with a workshop, a webinar for PW and my friends at Westchester Publishing Servi...
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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...
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It was a quieter week for product releases, but there were significant legal, policy and research developments. I am in Portland, Oregon ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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A slightly shorter newsletter than last time as it’s been a particularly busy week: several days of travel, and submitting the manuscript...
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I don’t set out with a particular theme in mind for each week’s newsletter: sometimes the things I’ve found in my research cluster serend...
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I’m sending this week’s newsletter a day early, as Friday and Monday are public holidays here in the UK—judging by the out-of-office mess...
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For authors, publishers and technology companies, it’s been a week that challenges the old axiom that there’s no such thing as bad public...
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It’s been a busy week, with significant developments in copyright policy and a steady drumbeat of new research and product launches. The ...
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I’m catching up after three intense days at London Book Fair. That intensity has been mirrored in the AI world, with a slew of copyright ...
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It has been a week in which AI moved decisively out of product demos and into politics, newsrooms, courts, and war. Across very different...
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A slightly shorter—and later—newsletter than normal, as I’ve been on the road this week (six webinars and courses in four days—welcome to...
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In recent months there has been a discernible shift in AI—and the pieces I feature—away from simple chatbots to agentic tools like OpenAI...
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Only two out of nearly three dozen publishing job ads I reviewed this week mentioned AI skills. Meanwhile, the marketing world has moved ...
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This week’s stories play out at a distance—in financial markets, academia and big tech—but they point clearly toward future directions fo...
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There are two big themes in this week’s newsletter: utility and accountability, and they don’t sit easily together. The productivity gain...
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This week’s headline stories sit at the uncomfortable boundary between assistance and dependence. From lost intellectual scaffolding to n...
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This week’s AI stories are less about capability and more about control: how models are trained, when licensing works, and where consent ...
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Happy New Year. The first AI stories of 2026 aren’t about speed or scale, but about authenticity—who is speaking, what can be trusted, an...
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Publishing seems to have been slowing down for the holidays for the last couple of weeks, and while AI isn’t on quite the same trajectory...
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A slightly shorter newsletter than normal this week, as I have been balancing four days on the road for a conference and board meetings, ...
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This was a week in which AI refused to behave according to anyone’s preferred narrative: strong environmental claims unravelled, legal ca...
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Happy Black Friday. This Sunday marks three years since ChatGPT first appeared: a toddler in human years, already learning to run, leavin...
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This week has been full of stories that show how fast the conversation around AI, authorship, and creative integrity is moving. From new ...
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Hello from Dublin, where I’ve been speaking at the Publishing Ireland conference. It’s been a really excellent day and good to see many s...
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I sent the first of these newsletters a year ago this week, to twenty-seven friends and colleagues. Since then, it’s grown to over 1,500 ...
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Greetings from New York City, where I’ve been on a working vacation for the last week. It’s my first time back since Covid, and besides t...
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For the first time in a while, I didn’t go to Frankfurt Book Fair and experienced it vicariously through Slack, WhatsApp and press update...
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It’s been a heavy week with travel, an IPG Lunch and Learn update and interesting discussions at the BISG AI Working Group. But before pu...
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Another week, another flood of AI product announcements from Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI and Anthropic. But some of this week’s news feels ...
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The approval of the settlement in the Bartz v. Anthropic litigation overshadows most other developments for publishers this week. But els...
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A slightly shorter email than usual today, as it’s been a very busy week of travel. I had conversations about AI in some interesting plac...
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This week’s stories point to deeper layers of the AI stack: standards, infrastructure and how organisations are evolving. From licensing ...
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This week’s practical insight focuses on two linked topics: onboarding and oversight of AI models. But there are also more philosophical ...
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The AI and content ecosystem is maturing fast. The big news this week is a settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic with implications for other l...
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AI is changing how people produce, discover and evaluate content. This week’s stories show how fast those shifts are happening. From Amaz...
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This edition covers OpenAI’s response to GPT-5 feedback with a partial model selector and a 140,000-word context window, Drew Breunig on ...
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As AI capabilities expand, so does the gap between what’s technically possible and what’s useful and meaningful. Many of the links this w...
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This edition covers fresh data on student AI use and ChatGPT’s new Socratic Study Mode, NotebookLM’s new multilingual audio and video ove...
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It’s been a significant week of contrasting AI developments on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, the administration moved swiftly to...
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This edition covers ChatGPT’s new Agent mode and what it could automate for publishers, Matt Webb on governance lessons from Anthropic’s ...
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This edition covers Doug Shapiro’s media-trends slide deck and the questions it poses for any creative business, fresh Cambridge Universi...
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Happy Friday—though I’m writing this the day before on the way back from a great day at the Publishers Licensing Services Conference in L...
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It’s been a really significant week for legal developments: while the newsletter has more of a copyright focus than usual, the courtroom ...
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This edition covers Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s bullish AI update and what billions of agents mean for supplier teams, Turing Institute/LEGO ...
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It’s Friday 13th. Unlucky for AI image platform Midjourney, which is about to find out why “don’t mess with The Mouse” (or an earthier pa...
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Thirty weeks of doing this—thanks for sticking with me. Someone asked this week if this newsletter will be going paid, and to be really c...
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Maybe there will be a quiet week for AI and publishing. If so, we haven’t seen it yet. Across a range of stories this week, the clear the...
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This edition covers the US House passing a tax bill with a ten-year moratorium on state-level AI regulation, OpenAI’s continued lobbying ...
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I’m writing this from a very sunny Edinburgh, where I presented to the lovely Canongate team at their away day. It was great to get off c...
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This week’s newsletter starts with a question that’s been quietly nagging at many of us working with generative AI: are we saving time, o...
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There’s a lot to unpack this week, including a couple of quite contrarian views on the environmental impact of AI and on the use of copyr...
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This edition covers a correction to last week’s link on LLM task length, the new native AI text-analysis formulas in Google Sheets, the l...
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This edition covers the headline findings of Stanford HAI’s 2025 AI Index Report, fresh data on the rapidly growing length of tasks LLMs ...
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This edition covers Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke’s AI-first hiring memo, a behavioural study suggesting reader preferences for human authorsh...
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This edition covers Amazon’s new Nova Act browser-agent model, Google’s Gemini 2.5 reasoning model, Rachel Coldicutt’s responsible-AI dos...
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This edition covers OpenAI’s inline image generation in 4o and the Studio Ghibli controversy that followed, a US court’s refusal to halt ...
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This edition covers Meta’s attempt to block Sarah Wynn Williams’s memoir Careless People and The Atlantic’s forensic exposé of Meta’s tra...
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This edition covers OpenAI’s “freedom-focused” pitch to the Trump administration on AI policy, an FOI revealing Peter Kyle’s use of ChatG...
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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 digi...
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This edition covers a busy week at the IPG Conference and a striking Ethan Mollick chart on AI’s collapsing cost and rising performance, ...
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This edition covers The Guardian’s licensing deal with OpenAI alongside the New York Times rolling out internal AI tools, reflections fro...
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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 in...
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This edition covers Adam Hyde’s hands-on demonstration of OpenAI’s Operator agent for research publishing workflows, the unredacted Meta ...
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This edition covers the arrival of DeepSeek and what it means strategically and economically, Apple’s iOS 18.3 changes pausing news summa...
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This edition covers the $500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure consortium, impending litigation between the News Media Alliance and an u...
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This edition features stories on the UK’s national AI strategy, a study of LLMs in education, Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwai...
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This edition covers Fable’s offensive AI-generated reading summaries and the lessons for publishers, Scott Belsky’s “Small Teams, Big Bus...
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For anyone taking stock of AI developments as the year turns, Simon Willison’s end-of-year roundup is phenomenally good. I recommend read...
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This edition covers the UK government’s consultation on copyright and AI, an Amazon job listing that hints at deeper AI use inside the Ki...
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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 ...
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This edition examines the ALCS report on authors and AI training, Pleias’s openly-licensed and energy-efficient LLMs, new content deals f...
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This edition looks at Steven Johnson’s Long Context project, the Activate 2025 outlook on AI search and disintermediation risks for publi...
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This edition unpacks the HarperCollins–Microsoft AI licensing deal and its wider implications for trade publishing, OpenAI’s o1 models re...
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This edition covers Google’s new AI video tool for Workspace customers, a US federal ruling dismissing a copyright suit against OpenAI, f...
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This edition covers the dispute over an AI-generated cover for Jodi Picoult’s new book, Anthropic’s new CSV analysis feature in Claude, t...