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George Walkley reports on a year of thinking about AI in publishing
Last year, the Independent Publishers Guild (IPG) asked me to develop its training offer in generative artificial intelligence. Since we introduced the training last September, I've delivered open enrolment training days to IPG members, bespoke training to individual companies, and previews of the training at the IPG Autumn Conference and at Frankfurt and Sharjah Book FairsInternational Book Fair Information. So far, the training has reached delegates from nearly 200 publishing organisations around the world, with great feedback. Despite the enormous variety of publishers taking part, some key themes have emerged from my conversations.
There's more to AI than ChatGPT
Mostly when I talk to publishers about AI, their main interest is ChatGPT and similar models. That's not surprising: AI's impact on publishing has been a long time coming, but it was the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022 and the advent of tools that the average user could try in their browser that really started the current boom. Since then, controversies such as the use of pirated ebooks in the Books3 dataset to train large language models (LLMs) has kept them in the public eye.
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'Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.'