AI policy
This is how we view artificial intelligence in our work at EBW. It describes how our team, including our suppliers, should use AI-powered tools and services when working on our projects or with materials that belong to EBW, its clients and its partners. For brevity, the term ‘EBW IP’ includes intellectual property that EBW owns and IP entrusted to us by our clients and partners.
Summary
- We may use AI carefully to learn and understand its impact.
- Never process EBW IP with an AI service without explicit permission or safeguards.
- AI makes errors. Check everything it produces in fine detail.
AI is significant and powerful
Used well, AI can make us more productive. It’s the most significant productivity technology since the Internet, and we must apply ourselves to understanding it so that we can manage its impact, for better or for worse.
We want to use it carefully, sharing what we learn with each other, always wary of the hype machine that fuels and surrounds it.
If you choose not to use AI, that is absolutely fine.
AI is inherently inconsistent
Book production is mostly the removal of errors and the application of consistency. AI can help here, but cannot be trusted to do those things for us. It is in the nature of AI to produce inconsistent results, and to be unable to detect its own errors and omissions.
Never delegate work to AI where accuracy and consistency matters, unless you are going to check everything it produces in fine detail.
Humans are also fallible, but they work within social and economic systems built on trust, memory, and relationships, which regulate the nature and consequences of their errors.
AI services are untrustworthy
Most AI is only cost-effective when you’re using large platforms (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Midjourney, etc.) Not only are those platforms loosely regulated, but their teams are incentivised to push or exceed the boundaries of law and good sense.
Never upload or show EBW IP to an AI service, unless you are absolutely certain that you have the right to do so, or the service’s terms of use explicitly and unambiguously guarantee that that IP will not be used by the platform for any other purpose.
Sharing EBW IP to an AI service without explicit permission or safeguards is a serious breach of confidentiality, much like sharing it with any outside party who shouldn’t see it.
For example, never give ChatGPT text from a novel you’re editing for a commercial publisher. Never ask Claude about code that contains sensitive information, like passwords, unless you are certain that it won’t be stored or used outside of your chat. You may upload IP that has already been published under an open licence (e.g. CC BY), where that licence does not explicitly prevent such use.
When you produce work using an AI service, you need to be certain that the service does not own the outputs. You (or EBW as your employer or work-for-hire client) must own the outputs. Otherwise we cannot use them in our work.
Art beyond science
Technology has always replaced human work over time, including our artistic work. And when it does, that work is no longer really art. It’s science mimicking art. Art is the meaning that humans create beyond science, often using science. And that art includes the creative work we do with books.
So AI is not a threat to what we do as ambitious creative people. Our job is to create the art that lies beyond what science has learned to mimic.
For many years EBW’s mission has been to set new standards for book-making. This remains as true and important as ever.