pakaljob

alexismcaulay3/pakaljob

For Christmas I got a fascinating present from a good friend - 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 evaluations.

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a few easy prompts about me provided by my friend Janet.

It's an interesting read, and uproarious in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It simulates my chatty design of writing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.

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

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

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

When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, since rotating from compiling 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 large language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody developing one in anyone's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, produced by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a "personalised gag present", and yewiki.org the books do not get sold further.

He wants to widen his variety, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - offering AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to create, and securityholes.science it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

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

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

"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. It's works of art. 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 not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for innovative purposes should be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without authorization must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective however let's develop it ethically and relatively."

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 material for training functions. Others have chosen 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 creators' material on the internet to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull 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 ruining the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is also strongly versus getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of pleasure," states the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining among its best performing industries on the unclear promise of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made till we are definitely positive we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them license their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a nationwide information library including public information from a wide range of sources will also be made offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 improve the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share information of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is said to desire the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a number of suits versus AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

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

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

If this wasn't all enough to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being the a lot of downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it developed its innovation for a portion of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

But provided how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure the length of time I can remain confident that my considerably slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the biggest developments in global technology, with analysis from BBC correspondents around the globe.

Outside the UK? Register here.