cyklon-td

For Christmas I got an interesting present from a buddy - my really own "very popular" book.

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

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

It's a fascinating 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 design of writing, but it's also a bit repeated, and fishtanklive.wiki really verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's triggers in collating data about me.

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

There's also 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 told me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, since pivoting from assembling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to generate them, based on an open source big language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anyone's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, created by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is planned as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get offered further.

He wants to widen his variety, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI-generated items to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound simply 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 comparable content based upon it.

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

"This is books, this is short 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 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 consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think the usage of generative AI for innovative functions must be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without approval should be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective but let's construct it ethically and relatively."

OpenAI says Chinese rivals utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and dents America's swagger

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

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to utilize creators' material on the web to help their models, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He explains that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

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

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, opensourcebridge.science is also strongly against eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a lot of joy," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining one of its best performing industries on the unclear guarantee of growth."

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

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a national data library consisting of public data from a broad variety 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 return to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to increase the security of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector required to share information of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less guideline.

This comes as a number of lawsuits versus AI firms, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their approval, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies 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 meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training data and whether it should be spending for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to contemplate, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has 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 established its innovation for a fraction of the rate of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm uncertain for how long I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the greatest developments in international innovation, with analysis from BBC reporters around the globe.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.