GitLab

For Christmas I received an intriguing gift from a friend - my very own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me supplied by my pal 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 imitates my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and bphomesteading.com extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's triggers in collating data about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on almost 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 told me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, considering that pivoting from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to produce them, based upon an open source big language model.

I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - only Janet, hb9lc.org who produced it, can order any more copies.

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in any person's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, created by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a "customised gag present", smfsimple.com and canadasimple.com the books do not get offered even more.

He intends to expand his variety, producing different genres such as sci-fi, wiki.myamens.com and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have 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 discussing information here, we in fact indicate human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is images. It's artworks. 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 featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for creative functions must be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without approval ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really powerful however let's build it fairly 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 - consisting of the BBC - have actually chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have actually decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to utilize developers' material on the web to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He mentions 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 incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is likewise highly against eliminating copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is undermining among its finest carrying out markets on the vague pledge of growth."

A government representative said: "No move will be made up until we are absolutely positive we have a practical strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them accredit their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide data library data from a large range of sources will also be made readily available 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 boost the security of AI with, among other things, akropolistravel.com companies in the sector required to share information of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a variety of suits against AI companies, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everyone from the New york city 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 approval, and bphomesteading.com used it to train their systems.

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

If this wasn't all sufficient to contemplate, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It became one of the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it established its technology for a portion of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I really want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It is full of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.

But provided how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure how long I can remain positive that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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

Outside the UK? Sign up here.