grammeproducts

For Christmas I got a fascinating gift from a pal - my really own "best-selling" book.

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

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

It's an intriguing 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 writing, however it's likewise a bit repeated, and very verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collecting data about me.

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

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

There are lots of companies online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, given that rotating from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The firm uses 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 produced it, can order any further copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in anyone's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, developed by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is planned as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He hopes to broaden his range, producing different categories such as sci-fi, forum.altaycoins.com and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

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

"We need to be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we really suggest human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is pictures. It's artworks. 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 tune including AI -generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for creative functions should be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without authorization need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really effective however let's construct it ethically and fairly."

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 industry and damages America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually selected to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have actually chosen to team up - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI developers to use creators' material on the web to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He points out that AI can make advances in areas 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 ruining the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is likewise highly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and an entire lot of delight," 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 development."

A government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a practical strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them accredit their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a nationwide data library including public information from a vast array of sources will also be 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 return to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to enhance the security of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a number of claims versus AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everybody 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 material from the web without their permission, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of elements which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and suvenir51.ru whether it should be paying for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it its technology for a fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I really desire 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 jobs. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But given how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure the length of time I can stay confident that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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

Outside the UK? Register here.