For Christmas I received a fascinating present from a good friend - my extremely 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 composed by AI, with a couple of basic prompts about me supplied by my good friend Janet.
It's a fascinating read, and uproarious 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 design of writing, however it's likewise a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.
Several sentences begin "as a leading technology reporter ..." - cringe - which might have been scraped from an online bio.
There's also a strange, repeated hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no family pets). And king-wifi.win there's a metaphor on almost 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 contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, because pivoting 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 generate them, based on an open source large language design.
I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - just Janet, who created it, can purchase any additional copies.
There is presently no barrier to anybody developing one in anyone's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and joy".
Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.
He wants to expand his range, creating different genres such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI-generated products to human consumers.
It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely 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 similar upon it.
"We should be clear, when we are talking about data here, we actually indicate human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard developers' rights.
"This is books, this is short articles, this is images. It's works of art. 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 song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.
"I do not think using generative AI for imaginative functions need to be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without consent should be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really effective but let's build it ethically and relatively."
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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have chosen to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.
The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to utilize developers' content on the internet to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.
Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".
He explains 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 altering copyright law and destroying the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.
Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is also strongly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.
"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a lot of pleasure," states the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.
"The government is weakening among its best carrying out markets on the vague promise of growth."
A federal government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made till we are definitely positive we have a practical strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their content, access to top quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI designers."
Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a national information library containing public information from a vast array of sources will likewise be made offered 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 increase the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.
But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is said to want the AI sector to deal with less policy.
This comes as a number of claims versus AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.
They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their consent, and used it to train their systems.
The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of aspects which can constitute fair use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and whether it ought to be paying for it.
If this wasn't all enough to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It became one of the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.
DeepSeek claims that it established its technology for a fraction of the rate 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 career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually 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 tasks. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts since it's so verbose.
But given how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure for how long I can remain positive that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.
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How an AI written Book Shows why the Tech 'Terrifies' Creatives
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