Technology, AI & Innovation at Pan Macmillan

Our approach to AI at Pan Macmillan

As book publishers, our job is to bring the brilliant work of our authors, illustrators and narrators to market and build an audience for them. If managed responsibly, AI can help us do this by improving our marketing effectiveness and making our books more discoverable. 

The development of AI, and its uses in publishing, is rightly subject to great scrutiny. Whilst it has the potential to deliver benefits, we believe it is vital that the right ethical and legislative guardrails are put in place around AI development, to protect the rights of authors, illustrators and other creators.

At Pan Macmillan, we pledge to always put our authors, illustrators, narrators and our people first in relation to AI. When we use AI, it is as a tool to encourage innovation and to enhance our effectiveness in our support of our authors' and illustrators' work to reach more readers and listeners. Within our business we can see how AI assistance built into our workflows and core processes can be transformative – for example, helping us to bring books to readers’ attention through AI-boosted metadata processes, and an AI-augmented approach to digital marketing.

‘We must use AI tools to make books as socially relevant, and as urgent, as the notification’

— Joanna Prior, CEO

In publishing, success thrives on variables like discoverability, distinctiveness, and reader loyalty. At its heart are the authors, illustrators and narrators who combine their creativity with unique lived experience to create compelling stories. We are a publisher of human stories, by human writers. Our job as publishers is to serve and support such creatives and to champion these human stories. Accordingly, when we use it, AI must be focused on the same goals. 

We know that human creativity is precious, and will always be steadfast custodians and advocates for it. We believe human authorship should be our default setting, not a specialist label. Therefore, we are committed to clear labelling for content that is significantly AI-generated as such, while any content without such a label remains assuredly human-authored.

At Pan Macmillan we are navigating the AI landscape through strategic partnerships, such as with Holtzbrinck’s wholly-owned AI company, CHAPTR and with our industry body, The Publisher’s Association. We aspire to be responsible leaders in our application of AI as a tool for our business and we work hand in hand with them to achieve this.

Our AI principles and policies

• We put our authors, illustrators and our people first in relation to AI
• We use AI as a tool to spark our own creativity and ensure that the training, tools, and development are available for safe and ethical use
• We aspire to be ethical leaders in the field of AI, continuously learning about AI safety and ethics from recognised experts
• We are open about how and where we use AI tools and we seek to measure and report on the impact of AI projects
• We champion diversity, equity, and inclusion to help reduce AI biases or inequalities
• We strictly observe data privacy, security and IP management principles when it comes to AI
• We work with industry bodies and our group companies worldwide to bring to bear on AI developments and legislation, ideas, opportunities and concerns as well as the rights of our people, authors and illustrators

We understand the concerns of authors, illustrators, narrators and other creators regarding the use of copyrighted works to train LLMs for generative AI purposes. As an active member of the Publisher's Association AI Taskforce and the Creative Rights in AI Coalition (CRAIC), we have undertaken a number of lobbying efforts to bring the government's attention to the way in which copyrights have been mined for AI training and to prevent any softening of the copyright regime in response to this. This work continues.

The challenge is immense, but so is the talent, commitment, humanity and resilience of our people. Together, we will ensure that while we utilise AI where it can be of benefit, the future of publishing remains brilliantly and uniquely human.

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How we use AI at Pan Macmillan

Consistent with our commitment to being open about our uses of AI, this statement serves as our disclosure that we use secure, enterprise-grade AI tools and technologies in the normal course of our publishing and business activities. These tools and technologies are used in a safe and ethical way to enhance productivity and innovation and assist our teams with tasks including, but not limited to, document review and summarisation, research, data analysis, online content moderation, and meeting transcription, as well as the generation of ideas, text, metadata, images, audio, video and marketing content. We ensure that our providers do not use our copyright material and confidential data to train public AI models. Where content is generated with AI assistance, it is subject when appropriate to human review, editing, and refinement before publication.

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