linkedtech

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

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a few easy triggers about me supplied by my friend Janet.

It's an interesting read, and extremely amusing 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 composing, but it's also a bit recurring, and really verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collecting data about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, 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 dozens of business online offering AI -book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, considering that pivoting from assembling 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 create them, based on an open source big language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in anyone's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, created by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get sold even more.

He intends to broaden his range, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human consumers.

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

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being utilized 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 in fact indicate human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard 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 learn how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a tune 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 actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for imaginative functions should be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without consent ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective but let's construct it fairly and relatively."

OpenAI says Chinese competitors utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes market and damages America's swagger

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

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He explains that AI can make advances in locations like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and ruining the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also highly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and an entire lot of happiness," says the Baroness, akropolistravel.com 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 federal government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made until we are definitely positive we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for right holders to assist them certify their material, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a national data library consisting of public data from a vast array of sources will likewise be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 aimed to increase the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are released.

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

This comes as a number of suits against AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everyone 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 content from the internet without their approval, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of elements which can constitute fair use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training data and whether it must be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It became one of the most downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a portion of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, lovewiki.faith 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 truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts because it's so verbose.

But given how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm unsure how long I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the most significant advancements in global innovation, with analysis from BBC correspondents around the globe.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.