We have just published our third AI special. Our first special looked at early learnings and the potential of AI, our second looked at successful use cases, and this one gets more into the nitty-gritty of precisely how AI can be used to deliver successful outcomes.
Now, as we approach the third anniversary of the launch of ChatGPT, certain trends have become clear.
AI is being used extensively by professional publishers and is being embedded into workflows.
Sadly, AI is also being used extensively by non-professional publishers to flood the market with bot-produced content. A lot of this is rubbish, but some of it is passable and showing signs of improvement. All of which makes it more challenging for our professionally produced content to stand out from the crowd.
The future of quality publishing lies with its humans! People who can write and produce captivating content – written or otherwise – infused with character, wit and insight, which entertains, enlightens and informs.
AI generated content will continue to get better, but will never be imbued with the humanity which makes content created by humans special.
So, the role of AI within publishing companies should be to free up human talent to do more of what they do best by performing some of the many important but hum-drum and repetitive tasks which need doing, but which no one went into publishing to do; to enable humans to interrogate vast swathes of data to unlock insights and trends; to enable personalised real-time marketing; to act as a turbocharged sandbox within which we can experiment with new product development; to provide summaries, listicles and snippets from our human-created content; to reformat and repurpose for overseas eyes and new channels. All super-useful supportive roles.
There is common ground across all our contributors to the special: that AI is here to assist, not to replace and that humans must always have the last word.
And that really is the acid test. If, by deploying AI, our people really do have more time to create the content that is our USP, then the future is bright.
If, on the other hand, cash-strapped publishers use the efficiency savings not to free up time, but to lay off creative staff, then the gap between the content we produce and that produced by machines will narrow to the point where what we do is indistinguishable from what they do, at which point publishing as we know it will cease to exist.
I only see that nightmare scenario happening at the margins; most mainstream professional publishers know that humans are their key differentiator, and are deploying AI accordingly.
I hope you find the special enlightening and inspirational. It was written by 12 living breathing humans, who are all making themselves available on Tuesday, 18 November for a ‘AI Special – Q&A’ webinar. Click here for more information and to register.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
