Helen King - Innovation Ideas

Athletes use tech to optimise performance, but they still do their drills to preserve reflexes and attention. Are we outsourcing too much, too fast, and paying the price in critical thinking, focus, memory, and recollection?

Let AI handle the boring stuff so humans can do more intellectually challenging work. But what if that boring, repetitive work actually matters? What if it's what keeps our judgment sharp?

Issue 98: A Bulletin for Big Ideas and Better Business Sol Rashidi on AI: avoid “intellectual atrophy” by using it to amplify creativity, not outsource your brain.

Sol Rashidi on "intellectual atrophy”: businessofcreativity.beehiiv.com/p/issue-98-a...
Business wants "pace and profusion, quickness over quality, speed over substance - we are looking for shortcuts everywhere, and all in search of 'more'."

It's forgetting the first turn of fairly short conversations, responding extremely and infuriatingly literally, interpreting rather than following explicit instructions.... ☹️

I ask it to find the name of a product in an image and I get a load of drivel and something that is obviously inaccurate. Switch back to an older model and, although it doesn't get the answer right, at least it's plausible.

Thinking it might be time to dump #ChatGPT 5.1. I am having so many problems with the model. I oost a small table of preferred date/time mtg response data, I get back incomprehensible/inaccurate results after much thought. Switch back to 5, and I get an immediate and correct response.

AI's original sin When Michael Barbaro interviewed reporter Cade Metz about tech companies training AI models on copyrighted books, he called it “AI’s original sin.”

New GenAI for Curious people post about AI's original sin - copyright theft: generativeaiforcuriouspeople.substack.com/p/ais-origin...

* 84% of publishers see AI-generated content as their biggest research integrity threat over the next 3-5 years, & 63% plan to increase automated AI content detection within 2 years.

* Over 60% plan to increase automated research integrity checks, with 61% targeting plagiarism detection.

* Among those using AI, 55% save 1-5 hours weekly, but 31% report no time savings.

* Sentiment toward AI is mixed. 48% feel somewhat positive about AI's potential in publishing, 28% feel negative, and the rest are neutral.

2025 Report: Technology Needs of Small and Medium Journal Publishers Insights into smaller-sized publishers' technical priorities, from research integrity to AI adoption.

A new report from Scholastica and Maverick Publishing surveyed 83 small and medium journal publishers from 21 countries about their tech challenges: lp.scholasticahq.com/technology-n...

Some stats:
* Current AI adoption is limited. Only 8% of publishers are using AI tools extensively.

Masthead for the Q4 2025 issue of the Maverick Insider newsletter.

Maverick’s Q4 Insider newsletter is out now – themed “Building a Foundation for Technical Success” with details on how a systematic audit and prioritized roadmap can provide a managed way to improve systems and the workflows that depend on them.

Read the insider: bit.ly/47vtn6q

YouTube video by monday.com Meet monday sidekick - AI you’ll love to use

Why did Monday do this to us?
youtu.be/5Hkcw_j8js0?...

🎵 AI had the time of my life,
AI never felt this way before...🎵

Sometimes AI should stay in the corner!

Big Ideas in Publishing: Jonathan Woahn on AI Licensing Infrastructure New interview: Jonathan Woahn on how his startup Cashmere gives publishers control over their content in AI systems. As Jonathan puts it, they provide tools to manage entitlement, security, access, re...

New interview in the newsletter: Jonathan Woahn on how his startup Cashmere gives publishers control over their content in AI systems. As Jonathan puts it, they provide tools to manage entitlement, security, access, reporting, and turn-key RAG infrastructure. open.substack.com/pub/pubtechr...

Your AI Safety Position is "The Cautious Builder"

I built this quiz for an AI Safety Collab - Summer 2025 Program project. Takes 2 mins and tells you your AI safety personality
mine's pictured - try it? innovationideas.co.uk/aisafetyquiz/

Helen King (@pubtechradar) I found Musk's discussion of how they’re building Grokipedia interesting in the latest All In podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6_VfR-CyuM According to Musk, they trained the system using syn...

More in this Substack note if you don't want to listen to Elon: substack.com/@pubtechrada...

YouTube video by All-In Podcast Elon Musk: 3 Years of X, OpenAI Lawsuit, Bill Gates, Grokipedia & The Future of Everything

I found Musk's discussion of how they’re building Grokipedia interesting in the latest All In podcast: youtu.be/j6_VfR-CyuM. Grok is teaching itself reasoning, then rewriting ~1M Wikipedia pages. The goal: a self-updating, “maximally truth-seeking” AI that fixes errors and filters bias.

Book Launch Event - Psychology of AI - London | BCS Publishing Join us in London next Tuesday, 28 October for the launch of The Psychology of AI Decision Making by Chris Ambler BSc (Hons) FBCS GMBPsS The event is being hosted by The British Psychological Societ...

Very interested in this and already have my ticket 🎟️. Looking forward to it 🧠🤖: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Books By People | Defending Organic Literature in an AI world Books by People's mission is to safeguard human creativity in modern literature by helping publishers and authors to certify their books as human-authored, with a process readers can trust.

📢 A British start-up, Books By People, is introducing an 'Organic Literature' certification to help readers identify books written by humans rather than machines. The first certified title, Telenovela by Gonzalo C Garcia, is due out next month, published by Galley Beggar Press.
🔗 booksbypeople.org

Quadrillions of tokens Quadrillions?

New #GenerativeAIforCuriousPeople post inspired by Sam Altman’s comment that OpenAI is processing 3.15 quadrillion tokens. I had to look up what a quadrillion was (15 zeros) & then I wondered what else is counted in Quadrillions…

generativeaiforcuriouspeople.substack.com/p/quadrillio...

YouTube video by a16z Building an AI Physicist: ChatGPT Co-Creator’s Next Venture

Periodic Labs: A new $300 million seed-backed startup aiming to build “AI scientists” — autonomous systems that hypothesise, run physical experiments, gather data, learn, iterate — especially in the physical sciences. They’re starting with materials/superconductors.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FoW...

Peer Review in Transition: Helen King and Christopher Leonard on AI and the Future of Peer Review - The Scholarly Kitchen Today, we talk to thought leaders Helen King and Chris Leonard, who offer a nuanced look at how peer review might adapt, fracture, or reinvent itself in the AI era.

"The research community doesn’t necessarily want ‘peer review’ — it wants quality assurance, fraud detection, constructive feedback, ethical oversight, and credible validation." @innovationideas.bsky.social / @scholarlykitchen.bsky.social

Copywriting word cloud in an open tablet next to a pen and a cup of coffee.

Maverick’s copywriting services help scholarly publishers use the written word to reach their audience in a variety of ways. Learn more and see examples in our new blog post
“Get the Message Out with Maverick’s Copywriting Services” bit.ly/3UZ3NzC

Rendering of a woman standing in the middle of a dark maze with lights guiding the way for her.

A new post for Maverick’s Insider blog provides complete details of our Interim Placement services, including examples of how we’ve solved staffing challenges for numerous publishers.
Read “Solve Staffing Challenges with Interim Support” bit.ly/3JkuBb1

Ai-Da and the Art of Storytelling: Reflections on Art, AI, and the Market When a robot sells art for over $1M, what is the collector really buying? A reflection on Ai-Da, authorship, and the art market’s blurred lines.

Fascinating - both the story and the robot. Is this Marketing or Art?
thenomadsalon.substack.com/p/ai-da-and-...

PR agency sells AI tool which sends out automated expert comment to journalists A PR agency is selling an AI tool which automatically answers pitches from journalists on services such as ResponseSource, HARO and Qwoted.

From @pressgazette.co.uk: A PR agency is flogging an AI that auto-generates expert quotes with fictional bios and pre-written charm aimed at Journalists. It’s fast and it's scalable, but do we really want to live in this kind of world?

🔗 pressgazette.co.uk/news/pr-agen...

The Inquiry - Is AI eroding our critical thinking? - BBC Sounds Are we allowing AI to make our brains lazy?

Interesting listen - This episode of The Inquiry discusses the trade-offs between productivity and mental acuity in the digital age: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

ChatGPT advises women to ask for lower salaries, study finds A new study has found that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT consistently advise women to ask for lower salaries than men.

A reminder of how pervasive gender bias can be. This study found that when given identical profiles, ChatGPT’s o3 model recommended a $280,000 target salary for a woman versus $400,000 for a man solely based on gender:

thenextweb.com/news/chatgpt...

New study from the Max‑Planck Institute: ChatGPT has begun influencing human speech. Analysis of over 740,000 hours of academic podcasts and YouTube lectures shows a significant surge in ChatGPT‑preferred vocabulary such as “delve,” “comprehend” and “meticulous” since 2022.

arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01754

Photograph from behind of a man at a computer with the words "Candidate Search" on-screen.

Think Selection Managing Director, Danny Parnes, explains how he goes about identifying and recruiting candidates with the skills and expertise that reflect the new landscape of publishing.

Read “Recruitment trends in publishing: Adapting to a changing landscape” bit.ly/40aTJ9D

I used to sit next to someone who wrote abstract summaries for a series of academic journals, condensing complex, nuanced thinking into tight little summaries. It was meticulous, relentless work that usually left them a touch frayed by lunchtime. I suspect Carr would have quietly sympathised.