For Christmas I got an intriguing present from a buddy - my really own "best-selling" book.
"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (great title) bears my name and my picture on its cover, and it has radiant reviews.
Yet it was completely written by AI, with a couple of simple triggers about me provided by my buddy Janet.
It's a fascinating read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.
It simulates my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit repeated, and really verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's triggers in collating data about me.
Several sentences start "as a leading technology journalist ..." - cringe - which could have been scraped from an online bio.
There's likewise a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no family pets). 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 contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, garagesale.es since pivoting from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.
A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to create them, based upon an open source big language model.
I'm not asking you to buy my book. Actually you can't - only Janet, who produced it, can order any additional copies.
There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in anybody's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, developed by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and happiness".
Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is planned as a "customised gag gift", and hikvisiondb.webcam the books do not get sold even more.
He wants to expand his variety, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human customers.
It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound just like me.
Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have actually expressed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar content based upon it.
"We must be clear, when we are discussing information here, we really mean human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect creators' rights.
"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to learn how to do something and after that do more like that."
In 2023 a tune including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers 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 creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And wiki.myamens.com although the artists were fake, it was still hugely 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 people's work without consent must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really powerful however let's construct it fairly and relatively."
OpenAI states Chinese competitors using its work for their AI apps
DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking
China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and damages America's swagger
In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.
The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use creators' material on the web to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders choose out.
Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".
He explains that AI can make advances in areas like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.
"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and messing up the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.
Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also highly against removing copyright law for AI.
"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of delight," states the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.
"The federal government is undermining among its best carrying out industries on the vague promise of development."
A federal government representative said: "No move will be made until we are definitely confident we have a practical plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them accredit their content, access to high-quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI designers."
Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide information library consisting of public information from a wide variety of sources will also be offered 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 aimed to boost the safety of AI with, trade-britanica.trade to name a few things, elclasificadomx.com firms in the sector required to share information of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.
But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is said to desire the AI sector to deal with less guideline.
This comes as a number of suits against AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.
They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the web without their consent, and used it to train their systems.
The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it training information and whether it need to 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 ended up being the a lot of downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.
DeepSeek declares that it established its technology for a portion of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present 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 write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to read in parts since it's so verbose.
But given how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not sure how long I can remain positive that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.
Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the biggest developments in worldwide technology, with analysis from BBC reporters around the world.
Outside the UK? Register here.
1
How an AI written Book Shows why the Tech 'Frightens' Creatives
Archie Ragsdale edited this page 4 months ago