GitLab

For Christmas I received an intriguing gift from a friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a few easy triggers about me provided by my pal Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of composing, however it's likewise a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's triggers in collating data about me.

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

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

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

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, wiki.vst.hs-furtwangen.de based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, considering that 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 uses its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source big language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone creating one in anyone's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, produced by AI, yewiki.org and designed "exclusively to bring humour and pleasure".

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

He intends to broaden his variety, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human customers.

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

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

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

"This is books, this is posts, this is pictures. 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 tune including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers 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 choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for innovative functions must be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without permission need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very powerful however let's develop it ethically and relatively."

OpenAI states Chinese rivals using its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: 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 chosen to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually decided to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use developers' content on the web to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He explains 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 nation's creatives," he argues.

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

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

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

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

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a national data library including public information from a wide variety of sources will also be made readily available to AI researchers.

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 improve the safety 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 released.

But this has now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a number of lawsuits versus AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the internet 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 factors which can make up fair use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training information and whether it ought to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to consider, Chinese AI company 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 technology for a fraction of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

As for classihub.in me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

But offered how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm not sure how long I can stay positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are much better.

Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the most significant advancements in global technology, with analysis from BBC reporters all over the world.

Outside the UK? Register here.