AI policy

At Profile we are fighting for intellectual property rights in the age of artificial intelligence, alongside people across the creative industries whose work has been stolen by tech companies to train their models. However, we also understand that we must engage with these new tools, which are increasingly integrated into applications we use and working processes across the books industry.

So we commit to follow these guidelines. We intend that this will safeguard our authors’ work, as well as open up conversations, spark ideas, and encourage everyone to think carefully and creatively about whether, how and when they use AI.

· We respect copyright and will never upload our authors’ or our own work to models that will use it for training unless a specific agreement is in place with the author.

· We will vigorously defend our authors’ copyright and take seriously the responsibility of representing their rights.

· We distinguish between generative and assistive AI and acknowledge that assistive AI is already – and often invisibly – in use. AI will increasingly be integrated into applications we already use, and therefore we need to be as alert to that as possible.

· We believe that creativity remains a uniquely human quality and we value that highly. We do not want generative AI to be used in place of people, but sometimes people find it useful as a thinking tool. If that’s the case, we will be open about it, especially with authors.

· We recognise the high energy consumption of AI services and try to minimise our use where possible.

· In tandem with ethical concerns about AI, we must remember that copyright ownership is not clear in work produced by or with AI.

· We are aware that AI can hallucinate, or that it can supply copy that sounds plausible but is insubstantial. So anything that AI does needs to be carefully supervised, checked and appraised. It’s not always a route to saving time.

· It’s impossible to create hard and fast rules, so we must rely on ourselves and each other to be thoughtful, interrogative and open about our use of AI.

· We apply these principles to ourselves and we ask everyone we work with to respect them too. We will be as transparent as possible and are open to all conversations.