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1. Context: Publishers Are Missing AI’s Full Potential
With a market size of $4.8 billion and a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 30.8%, there’s no doubt that Artificial intelligence (AI) has infiltrated the publishing industry.
But there’s one problem: Despite the growing presence of AI in the industry, most publishers are not leveraging its full capabilities. Studies indicate that over 80% of leading publishers have not embraced advanced AI technologies.
Instead, they mostly use AI for basic tasks like generating content, editing & proofreading, detecting AI-generated content, snuffing out plagiarism, and the like.
These applications barely scratch the surface of what AI is truly capable of. Simone Taylor, Chief of Publishing at the American Psychiatric Association, notes that AI holds a lot of promise beyond the basics.
In her presentation on The Rights-Ethics Relationship in the Era of AI, Simone noted that there’s an opportunity in AI for publishers to access high-quality data for peer-reviewed content and possibly develop other streams of income. This is just one of many possible advanced applications.
In fact, according to a study by The Reuters Institute, the publishing scene is expected to see more advanced use cases of AI, including but not limited to:
- AI-powered personalization and recommendations
- Data investigation and verification
- Text-to-speech conversions
- Article translations
There’s so much more to look forward to.
2. Basic AI vs. Advanced AI: A Comparison
What Does Basic AI Look Like in Publishing Today?
Tasks like translations, grammar, spelling, and plagiarism checks are the most popular usages of AI in publishing today.
Out of 245 research participants in a 2023 study by Agung Rinaldy Malik, 56.9% use AI for grammar and spell checks, 79.9% use AI for translations, and 58.7% rely on AI for generating essay outlines.
Here’s a quick breakdown:
- AI-driven tools like Grammarly and Quillbot are trained on millions of data on grammar to provide users with grammar recommendations when writing.
- Grammarly provides plagiarism detection for users by analyzing and comparing texts with a large database of over 16 billion web pages of academic and non-academic writings.
- Quillbot goes further by recommending paraphrases or rewording flagged texts.
- Other AI tools like ChatGPT are popular for summarizing and simplifying long texts into bite-sized pieces.
That being said, basic AI goes beyond plain grammar and plagiarism checks.
Yinqi Bai, in Patterns Vol. 5 Issue 10 2024, noted that he uses AI for keyword research, data collection, and proofreading. In the same report, James Z. Wang also revealed that he relies on AI for screening and formatting manuscripts.
What you've seen thus far is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more basic applications of AI on the publishing block.
In fact, when we asked Maxime Topolov, Co-founder & CEO of code.store, he gave us 4 more basic uses of AI he's come across in his line of work.
The first one he mentioned was title generation. Maxime explains that some publishers use AI to create multiple titles for their articles and then decide on the most ideal version. According to him, publishers “write the article, generate titles, and then test them to see which one is better”.
The second basic AI use Maxime talked about was summarization. This involves using generative AI to come up with summaries of already-written articles.
Fact-checking is another basic AI usage that has been brought to light. According to him, “You can check through your article, and verify the information in it”.
Finally, AI is also used to create what Maxime calls “multilingual versions” of articles. This lets you translate articles into various languages to suit readers with diverse cultural backgrounds.
When you consider all of the above, it appears that the most basic AI usages revolve around content editing, formatting, and research. They’re okay, but they’re not very impressive. Hence the reason why advanced AI features are on the rise.
What Advanced AI Could Be
Advanced AI use is still in its early stages. It’s not very rampant right now, but here, we’ll discuss some advanced use cases of AI that’ll likely grace the publishing scene in the near future.
Generating Unique Content
Richard Fairbairn, CPO at Glide Publishing Platform, emphasizes the various use cases for AI in publishing, stating that one of the most advanced applications to look out for is the creation of unique content. According to him, uniqueness “adds some actual utility to the business, as opposed to being just a few words on a page”.
To achieve this ‘uniqueness’, Richard recommends training the AI on the brand’s own data, rather than relying on billions of random data scraped online (which merely lead to generic generations).
He comments: “The bit where there seems to be real interest is using your own store of data”. This, he notes, allows you to generate content or “advice that is unique to your business”.
Repurposing Content for Social Media
Besides aiming for originality, an advanced use of AI is to repurpose content for other media platforms. According to Maxime Topolov, “We could see AI turn long-form articles into short content for social media”.
This process would typically begin with a thorough analysis of the key points of the story, after which the content will be condensed without losing its essential elements.
Transcribing Audio and Video to Text
Another advanced AI usage is transcribing audio and videos into coherent articles for readers.
Not everyone enjoys or has the time to listen to podcasts and watch videos. For some, it’s a lot easier to get information through flash-reading. With time, AI transcription will be optimized to serve this category of users.
Creating Location-Specific Content
As time goes on, AI will be able to customize publishers’ content with geo-localization. For instance, recommendations on platforms like YouTube differ based on two key factors—user preference and geo-localization.
AI would analyze user activity to discover the user’s preferred content. This would then be compared with the most prominent type of content in the user’s location to create better personalized recommendations.
Analyzing, Verifying, & Extracting Data in Bulk
AI today is prone to hallucinating and providing false information. In the future, AI models will rely heavily on data analysis to curb inaccuracies.
Instead of leaving the AI to generate content on its own, you use it to analyze copious amounts of existing data, identify specific information amongst the masses, and extract relevant information for use.
In addition to helping publishers steer clear of inaccurate reporting, it also helps them access data quickly and ultimately improve their work speed.
Optimizing Workflow
Certain advanced AI features can optimize the workflow of media companies and improve their efficiency. Arthur Murauskas, Co-founder & CTO of code.store details one real-life illustration.
“We have worked on one big project in Brazil, where they had to lay off part of the editorial team. They had to find how they could improve the productivity of the remaining journalists. So they transcribed videos with AI and used them to generate the articles”.
More Advanced AI Features For Your Business
Although we’ve highlighted a few already, AI has more advanced use cases in store for publishers and their audiences. In our webinar, we will discuss these applications and how they can benefit you. Don’t miss it.
3. How Glide CMS Empowers Publishers with Advanced AI
There’s a lot of pushback against AI from journalists and global teams. This also resonates with SurveyMonkey’s report on over 2000 customers, where 90% prefer human content to AI-assisted ones.
Why is this happening? Arthur Murauskas explains how media professionals and consumers share a mutual lack of trust in AI. He also explains that the distrust comes from AI’s tendency to fabricate information and generate fake news.
According to him, “It’s like the Wild West right now with AI”. He continues: “The big problem is the hallucinations and creating fake stuff”. Understandably, this makes publishers wary.
Against this backdrop, Glide Publishing Platform’s content management system, Glide CMS, offers a host of more trustworthy applications of AI for publishers.
Glide CMS’s Advanced AI Features for Publishers
Beyond automating production tasks, Glide CMS packs a handful of advanced AI features such as predictive analysis, workflow optimization, content screening, and personalization in its Glide AI Assistant, GAIA.
Natively built into the Glide CMS platform, this suite of AI software tools offers several features to serve the needs of publishers and media companies.
First off, it has what’s called “Pre-flight”. AI takes on the role of an editor and judges whether your content is ready for consumption. It doesn’t rewrite or generate anything. It just assesses the quality of your work before it’s published. Richard Fairbairn explains thus:
“Pre-flight is doing the work of what we would call an experienced news editor or sub-editor. It won't rewrite anything. It doesn't touch the content. But, it can flag up things that might be missing - perhaps a bit more politely than a harassed late-night editor. Preflight is our way of showing people a way to use Al to qualitatively assess content in a way that’s very helpful to professionals.”
GAIA Summary, as the name implies, creates summaries to allow publishers to quickly grasp the essence of articles or create concise versions for different platforms. This saves time and ensures key information is easily accessible.
To add, GAIA has a unique language translating feature in GAIA Translate that not only translates articles but does so in record time. With just a few keystrokes, you can translate articles into 75 languages.
Finally, the Glide AI assistant significantly enhances SEO for publishers. It automates the addition of metadata, optimizes content placement within a taxonomy structure, and facilitates content regionalization. This automated SEO process empowers publishers to produce and distribute new content more rapidly.
Conclusion
As AI begins to reshape the media industry, it’s clear that the vast potential remains yet untapped. Publishing companies that dive into advanced AI now will gain the edge over those who delay.
Want to learn more about how AI can improve your publishing strategy and help you gain a competitive edge? We cover all this and more in our upcoming webinar. Sign up for our newsletter to get your invitation delivered straight to your inbox!
We’ll shed light on the applications of AI in media, share real-world examples of successful implementations, and offer expert insights on integrating AI into your workflow.
