As predicted in a recent blog post, I have come back this week to a topic that will be on the lips of publishers, and authors, from a long time yet, that of artificial intelligence (AI).

The recent announcement by the academic publisher Wiley that it is starting an AI partnership programme with Potato, an AI research assistant, to advance the development of new AI applications, assistants and agents through the use of Wiley’s “rich authoritative content” is a prime example of the kind of tie-ups that tech companies are seeking to pursue.

The Bookseller reports that Wiley had surveyed almost 5,000 researchers about the use of AI, and 69% of them responded they wanted to "keep up with or be ahead of the curve" with the technology in their field. They also highlighted the need for better and more reliable AI tools.

Consequently, "we really decided to lean in on AI," Josh Jarrett, senior vice-president of AI growth at Wiley, told the magazine. "We think that this creates a lot of opportunities, a lot of challenges, but that we’re going to be able to navigate that as effectively as possible by really being part of the solution, leaning in, experimenting, learning, sharing with our stakeholders, adapting. We really want Wiley and our partners to shape the AI world and AI future, as opposed to being shaped by it.”

The company's argument is that the large language models (LLMs) on which AI tools rely never come up with precisely the same answer in response to a prompt, and they may, if they cannot give a suitable reply, hallucinate, or present an erroneous answer as plausible.

So by allowing Potato to use their content, Wily hopes to generate models that are more likely to provide a high-quality, authoritative solutions to research-based questions, and less likely to make mistakes.

The Bookseller notes that Wiley is just one of several academic publishers working with AI companies to train their LLMs. "Taylor & Francis and Wiley have already made licensing agreements, while Sage and Cambridge University Press are considering doing so, with the latter consulting its authors for their permission first," writes Matilda Battersby. It has also been reported that some academic authors have criticised publishers for engaging in licensing deals for the development of AI tools without having first consulted them or given them the option to opt out.

All of this puts me in mind of when the likes of Google and Facebook launched their online advertising services and entered into agreements with newspapers and other publications struggling to come to terms with how best to place themselves in the face of the vast technological and cultural changes that came with the widespread adoption of the internet.

With the still relatively new tech companies offering what seemed a lot of money to cash-strapped publishers but was merely a drop in the ocean compared with the vast sums that Google and Facebook were raising via investment (and especially compared with what they would later earn), publishers handed over the keys to their only real source of earnings, especially once the public stopped buying physical newspapers.

With the concurrent demise of classified ads, the newspapers found that their cut of what large companies were willing to pay to place adverts on their pages was much less than they anticipated, not to mention how the aggregation of news stories into Google and other search results (without paying syndication fees) impacted traffic to publisher websites, further pushing down ad revenues.

Indeed, Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the USA, filed a lawsuit against Google last year, accusing the tech giant of violating federal antitrust laws by illegally abusing a monopoly over the technology used by publishers to buy and sell online ads.

What publishers seemed not to have appreciated at the time was that the tech companies were merely flattering them when they gave the impression that they wanted to work with them to create something that would benefit both, and help them cut costs while increasing revenues. What Google et al were actually doing was cynically helping themselves to their proprietary content, and their lunch, right from under their noses.

I hope the book publishing industry is not about to be dazzled by the shiny allure of dollar signs into making the same mistake.