Headquartered in London, the Publishers Association represents more than 170 British enterprises of various sizes and areas, including consumption, higher education and continuing education.

With innovation and development, Britain's publishing industry contributes 11 billion pounds ($14 billion) to the general economy. The export value of the British publishing industry reached 6.5 billion pounds, surpassing all other countries in this respect. China is the third-largest export country of British books, with the export value reaching 37 million pounds.

Britain's publishing industry creates more than 84,000 jobs and hundreds of thousands of writers and researchers, providing source materials for film, TV series, theaters and video games. The success of British publishing industry is thanks to its robust copyright regime, Stevenson says.

When it comes to the application of AI in academic research, Stevenson used global academic publisher Elsevier's Scopus AI as an example.

Scopus AI is an intuitive search tool powered by generative AI, which helps researchers and institutions quickly access accurate summaries and research insights, fostering collaboration and societal impacts.

Developed and tested in the research community, Scopus AI combines the world's largest scientific literature database with AI, encompassing core content from over 7,000 publishers and more than 27,000 academic journals, with citations exceeding 1.8 billion.

"There are huge opportunities in our industry for applications like this," she says, adding that "it also presents a threat".

For large language models like ChatGPT that are trained on huge quantities of content to create humanlike texts, hundreds of thousands of book copyrights are within the training data, she says, which poses significant and related threats to human creativity and intellectual property.