For Christmas I received an interesting gift from a buddy - my very own “best-selling” book.

“Tech-Splaining for Dummies” (great title) bears my name and my photo on its cover, and it has glowing evaluations.

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

It’s an interesting read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders quite 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 really verbose. It might have exceeded Janet’s prompts in collecting data about me.

Several sentences start “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 feline (I have no pets). And there’s a metaphor on practically 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 contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, considering that rotating from compiling 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 on an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone creating one in anyone’s name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed “solely to bring humour and pleasure”.

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a “personalised gag gift”, and the books do not get sold further.

He wants to widen his range, generating different categories such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It’s developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI-generated products to human clients.

It’s also a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, asteroidsathome.net certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

“We need to be clear, when we are discussing information here, we really indicate human developers’ life works,” says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect creators’ rights.

“This is books, this is articles, this is images. It’s masterpieces. 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 song including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and wiki.piratenpartei.de they had not consented to it. It didn’t stop the track’s creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

“I do not think the usage of generative AI for imaginative purposes need to be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people’s work without permission must be prohibited,” Mr Newton Rex adds. “AI can be extremely powerful however let’s construct it morally and fairly.”

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

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to use developers’ content on the internet to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as “insanity”.

He points out 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 destroying the incomes of the country’s creatives,” he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also highly versus getting rid of copyright law for AI.

“Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of joy,” states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

“The government is weakening among its finest carrying out markets on the unclear pledge of growth.”

A government spokesperson stated: “No relocation will be made till we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to assist them license their content, access to premium material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI developers.”

Under the UK federal government’s new AI strategy, a nationwide information library containing public data from a vast array of sources will likewise be provided to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to manage AI is now up in the air following President Trump’s go back to the presidency.

In 2023 an executive order that aimed to improve the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share information of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been rescinded by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a number of suits versus AI companies, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everybody 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 material from the web without their consent, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under “fair use” and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of elements which can constitute fair use - it’s not a straight-forward meaning. 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 company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It became one of the most downloaded totally free app on Apple’s US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its technology for a portion of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American’s current dominance of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I really want a “bestseller” I’ll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It is complete of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to check out in parts because it’s so long-winded.

But given how rapidly the tech is evolving, I’m unsure the length of time I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are much better.

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