For Christmas I received a fascinating present from a good friend - my extremely own "very popular" book.
"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (terrific title) bears my name and my image on its cover, and it has glowing evaluations.
Yet it was completely written by AI, with a few simple prompts about me provided by my friend Janet.
It's an interesting read, and extremely amusing in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.
It mimics my chatty design of composing, however it's likewise a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It might have surpassed 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 strange, repeated hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.
There are dozens of companies online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.
When I got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, considering that rotating 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 produce them, based on an open source large language model.
I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - just Janet, who developed it, can purchase any further copies.
There is presently no barrier to anyone producing one in anyone's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and created "solely to bring humour and pleasure".
Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.
He wishes to expand his variety, producing different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human customers.
It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.
Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable content based upon it.
"We need to be clear, when we are discussing data here, we really imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard developers' rights.
"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to learn how to do something and then do more like that."
In 2023 a song including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media 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 developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.
"I do not think using generative AI for innovative purposes should be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without consent need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective but let's build it morally and relatively."
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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have decided to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.
The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to utilize creators' material on the web to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.
Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".
He mentions that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.
"All of these things work without going and altering 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 likewise highly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.
"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of pleasure," says the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.
"The government is undermining among its best carrying out industries on the vague promise of development."
A federal government representative stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their material, access to premium material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."
Under the UK government's new AI plan, a nationwide data library consisting of public information from a wide variety of sources will also be provided to AI researchers.
In the US the future of federal rules to control AI is now up in the air following President Trump's return to the presidency.
In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to increase the security of AI with, amongst other things, bbarlock.com firms in the sector required to share details of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.
But this has actually now been by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is stated to want the AI sector to deal with less policy.
This comes as a variety of claims against AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.
They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material 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 for that reason exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training data and whether it should be paying for it.
If this wasn't all sufficient to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the a lot of downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.
DeepSeek declares that it established its technology for a fraction of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing supremacy of the sector.
As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.
But given how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not sure the length of time I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.
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How an AI written Book Shows why the Tech 'Horrifies' Creatives
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