Former PRH US chief executive McIntosh discusses impact AI will have on rights community

Madeline McIntosh, the former c.e.o. of Penguin Random House US, spoke about the opportunities and challenges presented by Artificial Intelligence (AI) on a panel covering the impact of AI on the rights community.

The online event, which kicked off the 2023 Frankfurt Rights Meeting, covered issues such as international legislation, copyright concerns and contracts and looked at AI companies as potential licensees. 

McIntosh began by outlining her belief that the job of novelists is not likely to be taken over by AI models, illustrating this using the prompt that Gabrielle Zevin used to begin writing the novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Vintage). After inputting this on various AI services, she noted that the text they produced was dull and uninspired, contrasting this with the actual opening sentence of the book. “It really does illustrate AI as a force of mediocrity,” she explained.

But she also focused on how AI models present opportunities for trade publishers, noting that the risks had already been extensively covered during the panel. It is important, she explained, for businesses to view AI as a tool that can be used to help writers rather than technology that threatens to replace them.

“Everyone in publishing is severely overworked, I think we all can acknowledge that," she said. "So, I’m using efficiencies here not to suggest that there should be reductions in people’s jobs but more the use of technology which would actually allow humans to automate the parts of their daily tasks that are not as much worth their human time in order to focus more productively where we are best used.”

In terms of efficiencies, McIntosh discussed the “constant war against piracy” faced by the rights community, saying that while technology has been used to prevent this in the past, there will be new anti-piracy tools that can assist rights professionals protect works in copyright. She also said that AI can potentially help broaden the net of rights professionals who are scouting for new works that may be gaining popularity in different languages and territories. 

When it comes to how publishers and agents can use AI more broadly, McIntosh commented that it can be useful in helping find new audiences for published IP. Finally, she also noted that that there is currently a fear to speak on AI in the publishing industry now as the debate surrounding the topic is heated and industry professionals are concerned about expressing their position around these issues.

She said: “The reason that there is this kind of fear is because we see so much noise going on any time any development or opinion is surfaced; you immediately have the accusations.” She added that this “extreme position-taking” is not useful in helping the industry create protections for publishers and writers. 

The session was chaired by author and tech philosopher Tom Chatfield, while the other speakers were Duncan Calow, a partner at the law firm DLA Piper, Thomas Cox, managing director of IT services and consulting company arq works, and Peter Schoppert, director the National University of Singapore Press. 

Cox kicked off the event discussing the technical side of AI for the publishing industry and rights professionals. He said: “In the short to medium term… the rights business is a very personal one — the human touch, networking and negotiation are still core to the business — and I think book fairs are key dates within the calendar and that will remain the case. So, I think the core of that process will stay the same. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to change.

“You have AI-assisted authoring already, whether people are telling you that they’re using AI to help with their writing or not, that will be happening. We have AI-narrated audiobooks, which is becoming more common — Google and Apple have launched services earlier in the year and there’s plenty of other places that will generate audiobooks as well. AI-assisted translation is already a thing, and it’s only getting better, and there’s copyright and contractual concerns around all of that, which will affect the rights industry.” 

Looking ahead, Cox said that although it is currently difficult to imagine that AI could write poetry or novels, he can envision a future where there are available models trained on specific genres.