GitLab

For Christmas I received an intriguing gift from a pal - my extremely own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a couple of basic prompts about me provided by my friend Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty design of writing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in looking at information about me.

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

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

There are lots of companies online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, considering that pivoting from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

I'm not asking you to buy my book. Actually you can't - just Janet, who produced it, can buy any further copies.

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

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He intends to widen his variety, producing different genres such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human clients.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least due to the fact that 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 actually revealed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then churn out comparable material based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we in fact imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out 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 media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and suvenir51.ru they had actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, trademarketclassifieds.com it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for imaginative functions ought to be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without authorization ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really effective however let's build it ethically and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese competitors utilizing 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 - including the BBC - have actually picked to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have decided to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to use developers' 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, 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 ruining the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a lot of pleasure," states the Baroness, library.kemu.ac.ke who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening one of its best performing markets on the vague guarantee of development."

A federal government representative said: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them certify their material, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a national information library containing public information from a large range of sources will likewise be offered to AI .

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 aimed to boost the security 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 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 deal with less guideline.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits 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 declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their approval, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and online-learning-initiative.org are therefore exempt. There are a variety of elements 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 information and whether it need to be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it established its technology for wiki.piratenpartei.de a fraction of the rate of the similarity 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 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 existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to read in parts because it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not sure how long I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and modifying abilities, are much better.

Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the most significant advancements in international technology, with analysis from BBC correspondents around the world.

Outside the UK? Register here.