Even the ‘For Dummies’ books are getting in on AI

The publishing house behind the books has already completed a content rights project with one major tech company this quarter

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a copy of "hacking for dummies" sits on a desk
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After decades of catering to “dummies,” the publishing company John Wiley & Sons is expanding into intelligence — or at the very least, artificial intelligence.

The publishing house is known for its “For Dummies” series, which provides how-to guides on subject matter including foreign languages, sports and interpersonal relationships. Now Wiley is seeing stock growth after announcing its partnership with an unspecified “large tech company.”

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“We’re seeing significant interest in leveraging our authoritative content to train AI and machine learning models,” interim president and CEO Matthew Kissner said in a Thursday statement. The New Jersey-based company said its full-year revenue was up 5%, in part due to “the GenAI content rights project.”

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Wiley said it has already completed a content rights project with one major tech company this quarter and plans to execute a second partnership in the 2025 fiscal year. While this marks the first official partnership between Wiley and artificial intelligence developers, the “For Dummies” series has already played a role in the proliferation of AI content.

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More than 900 “For Dummies” texts were among the contentused by the AI training system Book3 – which pirated copyrighted material to teach AI how to communicate, according to an Atlantic investigation last year.