The federation of publishers’ guilds in Spain begins meetings on AI and its implications for publishing and the language.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

See also today: Elsevier’s ‘Attitudes Toward AI’ Report: Mixed Feelings

‘The Will To Defend Our Presence’

The Federación de Gremios de Editores de España, the Federation of Spanish Publishers’ Guilds (FGEE), has appointed Fernando Benzo as its new general secretary and José Manuel Anta—director of the Federation of Associations of Publishing Distributors (FANDE)—as its new managing director.

And close on the heels of the news of those new leadership appointments, the federation has held an opening meeting in an examination of artificial intelligence and what it can mean for the book sector.

In an opening meeting on Wednesday (July 10), the organization was joined by representatives of the Royal Spanish Academy, the ministry of culture, education, labor and digital transformation and public service, as well as political representatives.

The president of the FGEE, Daniel Fernández, led the meeting in Sigüenza, saying, “We have a language with a presence that should allow us a place for ourselves in this new world, but I don’t know if we have the financial and technical capacity, as well as the will to defend our presence in this new world against the power of the great technological powers.”

Fernández was of course voicing a puzzle being explored in many publishing markets and languages, particularly in the trade book publishing sector, and he was tying it, of course, to the central role that Spain’s proud publishing and literary sector holds in the maintenance and development of the Spanish language. (See today’s article on a report from Elsevier on researcher-writers’ attitudes about AI.)

“As a sector,” he said, “we have adapted to almost everything, including technological changes. Now we’re in a new moment.

“We hope that AI will help us be more efficient in some of our processes. But there’s also a fear of the effects that this may have on the protection of intellectual property.

“We face a new challenge and it’s not clear that we publishers are going to be the main content providers, so we’ll have to act to continue defending our position, as we have done in the past.”

The FGEE conducts an annual conference focused on a topic of interest, and this year’s gathering has emphasized what is being called “an ecosystem of trust like the one that existed before the appearance of AI.

“Language is one of the main values ​​of the culture of a people,” said Muñoz Machado, director of the Royal Spanish Academy. Machado said that his organization “has dedicated 300 years to maintaining a lexicon and grammar with a normative nature.

“The dictionary, the spelling have been carefully considered. AI can change this.

“In machine language there is no control over the proper use of the language. Uncommon linguistic specialties are used that end up breaking unity. This would be a serious setback with a major cultural impact.”

To counteract this, Machado said the academy is undertaking agreements with global technology companies to get LLMs, large language models, trained in linguistic subtleties that adhere to the academy’s strictures.

“It’s about ensuring that the databases that feed the AI ​​use a body of colossal dimensions such as Spanish,” he said, “and ensuring that the quality of Spanish is guaranteed and biases that might represent discrimination are avoided.”

The EU’s ‘AI Act’

As Publishing Perspectives readers know, the European Union’s “AI Act” was announced to have been fully adopted on May 21.

At FGEE’s meeting, EU Parliament member MEP Iban García del Blanco spoke about the legislation as having “placed the protection of people’s rights at the center in the development of AI compared to other economic and technical models.”

Indeed, many world publishing markets outside Europe have watched with interest for an understanding of the various provisions of the EU’s legislation.

“An attempt is made to make investment and innovation in AI compatible in the European space,” García del Blanco said, “while limiting the possibility of violations of individual rights. New challenges now arise, such as legislating some specific cases. Depending on how it’s done, it will depend on whether we have one society or another.”

Relative to the protection of intellectual property—the copyright issues roiling publishing markets in many parts of the world—Quentin Deschandelliers, legal advisor to the Federation of European Publishers, analyzed some of the legal challengess opened in United States courts for copyright infringement in the introduction of AI, the results of which are yet to be known.

This, as he told the gathering in Sigüenza, has parallels to the beginning of the century with the appearance and development of the Internet, making it important—of course—to use licenses to ensure the protection of intellectual property rights.

Also on hand at the meeting were Juan Luis Pedreño, a spokesman for artificial intelligence with the Popular Parliamentary Group, and Andrés Pedreño, a professor of applied economics and founder of Torre Juana IA Hub, together asserted that there is “no longer an option not to integrate AI in companies that can use it for multiple applications” since we are living in an era of digital transformation. They would go on–according to the account provided to Publishing Perspectives–to “demand that steps be taken so that both Europe and Spain accelerate their development without fear, since unlike other places it has a robust democracy and advanced legal systems that represent a limit to the unethical issues of its use.”

At this writing, it’s unclear when a subsequent discussion of the topic is anticipated by the FGEE.

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More from Publishing Perspectives on artificial intelligence and publishing is here; and more on the Spanish book publishing market is here.