blogg

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

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

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me supplied by my pal Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty style of composing, but it's likewise a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a strange, repeated hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically 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 got in touch with the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, given that pivoting from putting together 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 create 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 buy any additional copies.

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in any person's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, produced by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and happiness".

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

He wants to broaden his range, producing various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - offering AI -generated goods to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit scary if, like me, you write for nerdgaming.science a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound just like me.

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

"We should be clear, when we are talking about information here, we really mean human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is photos. 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 tune including AI-generated voices of Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms because 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 hugely popular.

"I do not think the usage of generative AI for imaginative functions should be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without permission should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really powerful however let's build it fairly and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese rivals utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: 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 material for training functions. Others have decided to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to utilize creators' content on the internet to help establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He explains that AI can make advances in areas like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, setiathome.berkeley.edu journalists 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 the House of Lords, is likewise strongly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is undermining one of its best carrying out industries on the vague promise of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our objectives: 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 transparency for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a national information library containing public information from a large range of sources will likewise be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 boost the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share details of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been rescinded 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 against AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everyone from the New York 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 internet without their consent, and used 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 variety of elements which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector freechat.mytakeonit.org is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and whether it need to be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek claims 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 supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

But provided how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm uncertain the length of time I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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

Outside the UK? Register here.