GitLab

For Christmas I got a fascinating present from a pal - my extremely own "best-selling" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent title) bears my name and my image on its cover, and it has radiant evaluations.

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a couple of simple prompts about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It simulates my chatty style of writing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's triggers in looking at information about me.

Several sentences start "as a leading technology reporter ..." - cringe - which could have been scraped from an online bio.

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of companies online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, given that pivoting from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to produce them, based on an open source large language design.

I'm not asking you to buy my book. Actually you can't - only Janet, who produced it, can purchase any additional copies.

There is presently no barrier to anyone producing one in anybody's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, produced by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is planned as a "personalised gag gift", and accc.rcec.sinica.edu.tw the books do not get sold even more.

He intends to widen his variety, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human clients.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for addsub.wiki a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, yogaasanas.science sound much like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have actually expressed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out comparable content based upon it.

"We ought to be clear, when we are discussing information here, we actually suggest human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is photos. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to discover how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a song including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for imaginative purposes ought to be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without approval should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really effective but let's construct it morally and relatively."

OpenAI says Chinese rivals using its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes market and damages America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have actually decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to use creators' content on the web to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He points out that AI can make advances in areas like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and ruining the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, bphomesteading.com is also strongly versus removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a lot of delight," says the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening among its finest carrying out industries on the unclear pledge of development."

A government representative stated: "No move will be made until we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them certify their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a national information library including public information from a large range of sources will likewise be provided to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to control AI is now up in the air following President Trump's return to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to increase the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has actually now been reversed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less regulation.

This comes as a number of suits against AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their authorization, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training information and whether it ought to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its innovation for a portion of the rate of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I really want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But offered how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not sure the length of time I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the greatest advancements in global innovation, with analysis from BBC reporters around the globe.

Outside the UK? Register here.