GitLab

For Christmas I got an interesting present from a buddy - my extremely own "very popular" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (great 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 basic prompts about me supplied by my pal Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty design of composing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have gone beyond 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 likewise a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on nearly 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 contacted the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, gratisafhalen.be since rotating 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 create them, based upon an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone producing one in any person's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, created by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is intended as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He hopes to widen his variety, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - selling AI-generated items to human clients.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

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

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. It's works of art. 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 because it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for imaginative purposes need to be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without authorization should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful but let's build it ethically and relatively."

OpenAI states Chinese competitors utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: dokuwiki.stream The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have picked to block AI designers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to utilize creators' content on the web 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 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 ruining the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of delight," states the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at .

"The government is weakening among its finest performing industries on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A federal government representative stated: "No move will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to assist them accredit their material, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide information library containing public data from a wide variety of sources will likewise be provided to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal rules to control AI is now up in the air following President Trump's go back to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to boost the security of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is said to want the AI sector to deal with less policy.

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

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the web without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training data and whether it must be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It became the many downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

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

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

But offered how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not sure for how long I can remain confident that my considerably slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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

Outside the UK? Sign up here.