Grammarly's creative smash-and-grab ends in rapid retreat
What could go wrong releasing an AI feature which lets people have their text "edited" by famous real-world experts and writers? Everything, if you haven't asked them first.
Emulating the style of another writer is a skill few possess. Generally deployed for the purposes of satire or parody, it nevertheless remains a form of flattery, as all such imitation is at heart.
Is it possible then that this week Grammarly, of writing assistant tool fame, are guilty of over-flattery? Or is it more likely that they are guilty of illegal AI-enabled stylistic appropriation?
We're talking of the news this week that Grammarly - now sitting under the umbrella of a business with the wonderfully pompous name Superhuman - has been offering an AI-enabled tool that allows users to have their copy edited and elevated by artificial approximations of Steven King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and countless other established sector experts and voices, in a feature that sits under the name "Expert Review".
Problem is, it didn't ask or tell them.
📖 Read the full article on GPP.io
Publishing & Media
The audience you're losing
While interest in news has fallen by 40% among 18-24 year olds over the last decade, it's not because young people are disengaged from content: they spend nearly five hours a day on social media, but are just not coming to publishers for it. Creators are winning, algorithms are personalised, and the kitchen table newspaper has been switched out by a feed different for everyone. Publishers are again competing in a war, often armed with a rolled-up digital newspaper instead of changing the game to suit the way audiences have changed theirs. Harry Clarkson-Bennett shares more insight on why the audience isn't gone, it just needs to be met somewhere new.
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Hey [friendly sobriquet], this your [subscription] calling
Mexican football clubs are sitting on millions of social media followers they know almost nothing about. One club with 41,000 season ticket holders and a sold out stadium realised it had 12 million people calling themselves fans, but with no direct relationship to show for it. An answer among many to the issue? A registration programme that brought 550,000 fans into one-to-one communication with the club. Another club decided to go even further, asking fans what their friends and family actually call them - then greeting every supporter by their nickname in every communication. Season ticket sales and email opens rocketed. Having the data is one thing, doing something useful with it is another.
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The asset chaos ends here
Managing thousands of images daily across numerous formats and channels is faff enough, without also having to do it across multiple separate digital systems to boot. Fragmented storage, duplicated work, lost metadata and inconsistent presentation across platforms are a predictable result, not even mentioning the cost and risk of unintended usage. With Glide Media, you get a built-in DAM which puts everything an editorial team needs in one searchable environment, for images, audio, PDFs and other assets, directly inside the CMS you're already using. It's purpose-built for publishers and you can read about it here.
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Big Tech
Move fast, regulate faster
The UK government wants to move faster on online safety. Two new amendments would hand Ministers the power to rewrite nationwide online standards at a flash, with the goal to tackle AI-generated harms and harms to children. Setting aside the parliamentary debate which may never happen, a major question for site owners and anyone managing users and content is what does this mean to my business? If there's no debate, we don't know, comes the reply from MPs.
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Your European ad budget just got more expensive
Starting July 1st, running Meta ads to users in France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Turkey, or the UK is going to cost more. Meta is adding location fees to ad buys that match each country's digital services tax rate, meaning a $100 campaign targeting Italian users will now cost $103 before VAT. The fee applies based on where the ad is delivered, not where the advertisers is based, so US brands targeting European audiences are just as exposed. Google and Amazon already to do the same thing, but if you haven't revisited your European campaign cost models recently, July 1st is a hard deadline to do it.
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AI & Copyright
Publishers unite on AI licensing
A new collective licensing scheme has launched in the UK, giving publishers a way to get paid when AI companies use their content while also giving AI companies a legal and reliable source of material to train on. The pitch for the project, which is being led by non-profit organisation Publishers’ Licensing Services (PLS), is pretty straightforward: there is more and more low-quality content on the web and the number of copyright cases is not getting any smaller, so striking a deal seems like a much better alternative than going to court. The scheme is particularly aimed at the smaller publishers who don't have the scale to negotiate directly with the big AI players, giving them a seat at the table which they otherwise most likely wouldn't have.
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Write for humans, be found by machines
Getting cited by AI search tools isn't all about ranking well, because before that happens these systems first decide which pages are even worth considering. And if your content doesn't make that cut, then it never gets cited. Perplexity, Google, and OpenAI all have a slightly different approach, but the key thing for publishers is to focus on writing clearly structured content that machines can read while at the same time writing content that humans will enjoy reading.
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Don't trade art for AI promises
A House of Lords committee has told the UK government to drop the idea of letting AI companies use creative work without permission. The creative industries bring in £146 billion a year, and they have zero interest in watering down their copyright protections just so they can charm some US tech firms and server nobody's interests but theirs. The government has been pondering on all the options, from proper licensing to a full opt-out options, and the House of Lords want to make sure that the worst options are off the table from the start, before the economic impact assessment lands on 18th of March.
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Brilliant feature.