winehq

ulrikesprouse7/winehq

For Christmas I got an interesting present from a good friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

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

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

It simulates my chatty style of composing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collating 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 mystical, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

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

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, because pivoting from assembling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The firm uses its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source big language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, created by AI, and designed "entirely to bring humour and pleasure".

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

He intends to widen his range, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI -generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, ai-db.science you compose for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to produce, and yewiki.org it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are discussing information here, we really imply 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 short articles, this is photos. 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 since it was not their work and they had 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 think making use of generative AI for imaginative functions need to be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without permission must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective but let's build it fairly and fairly."

OpenAI says Chinese competitors utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: surgiteams.com The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

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

In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually chosen to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually chosen to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use content on the internet to help 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, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and messing up the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a lot of joy," states the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining among its finest performing markets on the vague guarantee of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made until we are definitely positive we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them license their content, access to premium material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide information library consisting of public data from a broad variety of sources will likewise be made offered to AI researchers.

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

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to boost the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the operations 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 instead, but he is said to want the AI sector to deal with less policy.

This comes as a variety of suits versus AI firms, and wiki.fablabbcn.org especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their consent, 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 elements which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training information and whether it need to be paying for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a portion of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has lots of inaccuracies and garagesale.es hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But offered how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure how long I can remain positive that my considerably slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the biggest advancements in worldwide innovation, with analysis from BBC correspondents worldwide.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.