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Machine learning and AI is going to be a key part of publishing in the next three years, liberating professionals from some of the production heavy lifting, experts have told the Independent Publishing Guild conference.
On the conference’s opening day in Heythrop Park, Oxfordshire, on Wednesday (1st May) Venetia Taylor, Google’s head of creative strategy, said tools were already available for publishers at every scale while PageMajik’s Jon White said AI had uses at every stage of the publishing process.
He explained machine learning could help with article and manuscript ingestion, the peer review process for academics and aspects of pre-press such as typesetting all the way through to warehousing systems.
“Something that previously took weeks or even months can now take only minutes,” he said.
Academic publishers like Elsevier and Springer Nature were leading the way in some of these processes, he said, pointing to a book released by Springer in April that was completely computer-generated - an overview of research on lithium-ion batteries. The book has no human interaction at all, using computers to add quotes, hyperlinks and automatically-generated referenced contents.
He said: “In certain areas, within three years, I think there’s going to be widespread adoption within the industry of solutions that will shorten the workflow.”
The use of such systems would save costs as well as time, he said, recommending publishers look right now at areas of their business that are squeezed the most, to see if machines can help. “I think this really is going to be the future in many areas of publishing,” he added.
Taking questions from the audience, White stressed: “I’m not belittling the production process at all, but there are manual processes machines can do better than humans.”
In her keynote speech, Taylor told the audience: “Machine learning is an amazing opportunity to get us into our creative zone and to amplify our human creativity.” Alongside saving time, systems that allowed companies to tailor content to their customers and give data on their propensity to buy were also in the works, she said.
She insisted data tools were available and scalable to the smallest of businesses. Taylor explained: “It’s less about the volume of data than the mindset shift, the belief that actually even a small amount of uncovering people’s actual behaviour can inform a different approach to business.”
The IPG Conference runs until 3rd May, including the IPG's annual awards on 2nd May.