AI in practice

In the September / October issue of InPublishing magazine (not yet on the mailing list? Register here), we are running our fourth AI special, which will be followed by a Q&A webinar in November.

In the special, leading suppliers will be drilling down into how AI is being used, looking at illustrative use cases and, as always with our specials, be providing three top tips.

We will also be asking a number of leading publishers about how they are currently using AI in their businesses.

So, I thought it only fair, if we are asking publishers to tell us about their AI usage, that we should do the same, so below are my answers to the questions we will be putting to a selection of leading publishers:

Q: What is the current state of play with regards to AI usage in your business?

A: There are four areas where we are using AI at the moment:

1. Article tagging. As of a week ago, we are now getting AI (Claude to be precise) to tag all our articles. Where, previously, humans would apply a range of tags (we use five different levels of tags), AI is now doing it for us. This saves time and will, in time, lead to greater consistency. In addition, Claude is also suggesting a range of additional tags for each article, which will broaden our marketing and content discovery options.
2. Reader prospecting. For over a year, we have been using AI to scan all the news stories we publish on our website and pull out names of potential new readers of InPublishing magazine. This was work we used to do manually, which was time-consuming and sporadic.
3. Summary text for key topics pages. Key topics pages are an evolving part of our website, where we pull together all the content we have published on a particular subject. Two examples are newspaper design and magazine design. The first draft of the summary text on these two pages was created by AI and then sense checked and refined by a human (me). I have to say that the AI text was 95% right first time.
4. Ad hoc reference and research. I will find myself occasionally turning to Claude to check short passages of text to see if they are grammatically correct. This has been very helpful and has saved time agonising over comma positioning, amongst other things. I will also, occasionally, use it for research, perhaps asking it to pull out the key points from a particular article which I might then use as a start point for an InPubWeekly editorial. I hasten to add that I would never use AI to actually write my editorials…

Q: What do you see as the best opportunities for future development?

A: The most obvious opportunity is in getting AI to do the initial processing of commissioned articles. Typically a commissioned 1600-word article takes us up to two hours to edit. Broadly speaking, there are three phases: formatting, first read, final read.

There is potential to shave off up to 30 minutes by getting AI to do the formatting and first read. The formatting, which typically involves spellchecking, space correction, special character standardisation etc etc is ethically safe ground, but getting the AI to do the first read is more problematic. Great care will need to be taken. It’s work in progress…

Q: What are your three key learnings to date?

1. Continually refine your prompts. You’re unlikely to get your prompts right first time – they will need to be fine tuned in light of experience.
2. Know where to draw the line. To what extent will you allow AI to author content? Where you decide to draw the line will have a big bearing on how much your audiences trust you.
3. Avoid misrepresentation. It’s very easy to get AI to create a piece of content, get someone to take a cursory glance over it and to then slap a human’s byline on it. This is dangerous. Once audience trust is broken, it’s very hard to put back together again.

To read the thoughts of publishers who are probably further down the AI road than us, make sure you’re on our mailing list in time for the September / October issue…

If you’re a supplier and would like to take part in our AI special, then please contact Martin Maynard.

James Evelegh

Editor