Earlier today I attended an online seminar hosted by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, where Dr Paul Crosby from Macquarie University presented recent research on authors and AI carried out in Australia. Many of the sentiments expressed in the research were familiar: author concerns about the morality of AI training and the impact of AI outputs on their livelihood echoed many of the findings of the Cambridge research on AI and the novel published last November. What I found most interesting about the Australian research is that it was interpreted through economics and econometric analysis. One of the key questions was whether, if AI companies train on human creative work without compensation, the long-run incentives for cultural production are weakened. The concern was that more economically marginal forms of publishing such as literary, niche and experimental writing could be hardest hit. Framing the impact on authors and the creative industries as an externality is a helpful way of emphasising to policy makers that the economic benefits of training on copyrighted work accrue overwhelmingly to tech companies in the US, while the costs are potentially distributed across the wider cultural ecosystem globally. This is a textbook setup for undersupply of a public good (creative works).

I’ve been leading training sessions on generative AI for nearly three years now, and over that time the advice that I’ve given on prompting has been relatively consistent: good results generally depend on a degree of detail and specificity about context, objective, and outputs. I was interested to see Ethan Mollick noting a change of emphasis in the developer documentation for GPT-5.5, OpenAI’s latest thinking model:

I’m writing this on the way home from Chicago, where I gave a keynote on AI and publishing at the ECPA Leadership Summit. As I said in my presentation, this is not an area of publishing I’ve worked in, and my role was to provide an outside perspective—less about the specifics of the sector, more about what AI might look like when viewed from beyond it. It was a really rewarding and thought-provoking experience, and I am very grateful to Jeff Crosby and his colleagues at the ECPA for their hospitality.

It has been a busy week: updating the materials for and delivering a lunch-and-learn session and another full day training course on AI for IPG members, and preparing a keynote presentation on the future of publishing for a conference in Chicago next week. To prepare for those things, I’ve been reading and talking to a lot of interesting people about how they are using AI at the moment. In between, I made a quick dash up to London for my ten year business school reunion—a room full of smart people from different industries who provide a triangulation to the publishing experience. There are three interesting patterns that kept coming up in all of those different contexts.

I’m on my way back from the IPG Spring Conference in London, always one of the highlights of the publishing year. It was a really good mix of the inspirational, the practical, and a uniquely generous, welcoming and supportive community. I particularly enjoyed the presentations from former Shazam chairman and crime writer Ajay Chowdhury, National Literacy Trust CEO Jonathan Douglas, BBC media editor Katie Razzall, Illumicrate CEO Daphne Tonge and Bonnier UK Co-CEOs Sarah Benton and Jonathan Perdoni. I spoke in the morning about the IPG’s forthcoming short training courses (data, content creation, websites/GEO and AI risk/governance) and in the afternoon to give members an update on the policy and licensing landscape for AI.

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I’m in New York with the family. We were up early for Brooklyn Bridge Parkrun—a very enjoyable, fast, flat course along the waterfront—followed by a cooldown walk around Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights.

(Originally posted on LinkedIn): I’m coming up on four years of working as an independent consultant, and I’ve hit the limit on working from home: too many distractions, from parcel deliveries to dogs (I blame the owners… 😉). So I am really pleased to have settled into my own office a short walk from home in Salisbury, to have a dedicated space for webinars/online training, and somewhere that I can meet colleagues and clients without cluttering up the kitchen table. If you’re in the neighbourhood, come in for a coffee or a walk over to Dark Revolution.

Running a business has its ups and downs. The successes are heightened because they are your own, but the corollary is that the low points feel particularly personal. This week I had disappointing news on two projects within about half an hour of each other—a blow even if I concluded after some reflection that I wouldn’t have done anything differently on either.