In the webinar "AI and the University Press: A Michigan Case Study" staff discussed how the Press is being impacted by the growing interest in GenAI. Three key impacts were described:

• Authors are using GenAI tools in creating their manuscripts
• Press staff and vendors are using GenAI tools when converting manuscripts into books
• Organizations are approaching the Press to license books for training their Large Language Models (LLM)

The presenters emphasized that U-M Press is a small publisher in the humanities and much of what is happening in the AI landscape is mysterious, secretive, and constantly changing. The webinar was not intended to claim any particular leadership or insight, but just to share the experience of one publisher in one corner of a rapidly evolving, rather threatening world, in as transparent a way as possible.

(And transparency includes noting that the rather sinister image at the top of this blog post was generated by U-M DALL-E3 in response to a prompt using the title of the video.)

As well as the video below, the slides are here and the transcript is here.