GitLab

For Christmas I got an interesting present from a friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me supplied by my pal Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and extremely amusing in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of writing, but it's also a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

Several sentences begin "as a leading innovation reporter ..." - cringe - which might have been scraped from an online bio.

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

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

When I got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, given that pivoting from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The firm uses its own AI tools to produce them, based upon an open source large language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in anyone's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is planned as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He wishes to broaden his range, producing different genres such as sci-fi, and genbecle.com possibly offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, akropolistravel.com you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably took less than a minute to generate, utahsyardsale.com and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce similar content based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we actually mean human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out how to do something and then do more like that."

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

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for creative purposes need to be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without authorization ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective however let's construct it morally and relatively."

OpenAI states 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 dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually selected to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to use creators' material on the internet to assist develop their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

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

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and messing up the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is likewise highly versus removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of happiness," states the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining among its best carrying out industries on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A government representative stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them certify their content, access to premium material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide information library consisting of public data from a large range of sources will likewise be provided to AI researchers.

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

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to increase the safety of AI with, among other things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has now been reversed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, townshipmarket.co.za but he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a number of lawsuits against AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out 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 web without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of factors which can constitute reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training data and whether it should be spending for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It became the a lot of downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its innovation for sitiosecuador.com a portion of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It is complete of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

But offered how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure for how long I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the greatest advancements in international technology, with analysis from BBC correspondents all over the world.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.