GitLab

For Christmas I received an interesting present from a pal - my really 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 completely composed by AI, with a couple of basic prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty style of writing, mariskamast.net but it's also a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in looking at information about me.

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

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

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

When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, given that 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 firm 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 produced it, can buy any further copies.

There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in anybody's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is intended as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He intends to expand his variety, producing different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human customers.

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

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then produce similar material based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we actually mean human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is photos. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out 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 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 trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe the use of generative AI for innovative functions must be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without authorization must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective however let's develop it morally 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 chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have chosen to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to utilize creators' content on the internet to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He points out 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 changing copyright law and destroying the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, mariskamast.net is also highly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and an entire lot 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 performing markets on the vague promise of growth."

A government representative stated: "No move will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a practical strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their content, access to premium product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide information 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 aimed to boost the security of AI with, among other things, 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 reversed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is stated to want the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

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

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of factors which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training data and whether it need to be paying for it.

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

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

As for smfsimple.com me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But offered how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain for 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 most significant developments in international innovation, with analysis from BBC reporters around the globe.

Outside the UK? Register here.