Waterstones would stock books created using artificial intelligence, the company's boss has said, as long as they were clearly labelled, and if customers wanted them. However, James Daunt, a veteran of the bookselling industry, said he personally did not expect that to happen. There's a huge proliferation of AI generated content and most of it are not books that we should be selling, he said. But it would be up to the reader. An explosion in the use of artificial intelligence, or AI, has prompted heated debate in the publishing industry, with writers concerned about the impact on their livelihoods.

H&M is good at making amazing frocks for the Met ball, but it's less good at making money: The company's profits for the first quarter of this year were down 69 percent, and it effectively ran out of cash in 2017. The latest pitch from the fast-fashion retailer, covered as a "pivot" in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, uses lots of trendy buzzwords like A.I. and big data. The general idea is that by "using algorithms to analyze store receipts, returns and loyalty-card data," H&M will be able to "tailor merchandise in each store to local tastes, rather than take a cookie-cutter approach." Stripped of its techno buzzwords, this is the old idea of localization, as laid out in a 2006 Harvard Business Review article by Vijay Vishwanath and Darrell K. Rigby. "The era of standardization is ending," they wrote.