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 this to safeguard our authors’ work, as well as encourage everyone to think carefully 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 believe that creativity remains a uniquely human quality and we value that highly. We do not want to publish books written by AI, and we hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold our authors to.
• We will be open about our use of technology, especially with our authors.
• While we are exploring use of AI when it can save us time with repetitive tasks, we do not use it for reading, thinking or writing. Anything that AI does will be carefully supervised, checked and appraised.
• We remain committed to protecting entry-level jobs.
• We recognise the high energy consumption of tech services and try to minimise our use where possible. For more information on this, refer to our Environmental Policy.
• We know that work produced by AI cannot be protected by copyright.
• 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.