GitLab

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

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a couple of simple triggers about me supplied by my pal 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 mimics my chatty style of composing, but it's also a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

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

When I got in touch with the chief executive Adir Mashiach, setiathome.berkeley.edu based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, considering that rotating from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The firm utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based upon 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 order any further copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone producing one in anybody's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, produced by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, classifieds.ocala-news.com the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is intended as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He wishes to expand his variety, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human clients.

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

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

"We must be clear, when we are discussing data here, we actually imply human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is pictures. It's artworks. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to discover how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a tune featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for innovative functions need to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without consent should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really effective but let's build 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 dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually chosen to block AI designers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for hb9lc.org example.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable 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 "madness".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations 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 messing up the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of delight," 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 carrying out industries on the unclear promise of growth."

A government representative said: "No relocation will be made up until we are absolutely positive we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for right 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 developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a national data library consisting of public information from a large range of sources will also be offered 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 to boost the safety of AI with, amongst 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 actually now been reversed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, 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 versus 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 internet without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

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

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

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

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It is complete of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But provided how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure how long I can stay confident that my considerably slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the biggest developments in international technology, with analysis from BBC reporters worldwide.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.