alaevavictoria

For Christmas I got an interesting present from a friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a couple of simple prompts about me supplied by my friend Janet.

It's a fascinating read, opentx.cz and very amusing in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of writing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in collecting data about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no animals). 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 primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly 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 utilizes its own AI tools to produce them, based upon 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 order any more copies.

There is presently no barrier to anybody developing one in anyone's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, produced by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He hopes to widen his variety, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human clients.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because 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 content based upon it.

"We ought to be clear, when we are talking about data here, we really imply human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is images. It's artworks. 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 including AI -generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for innovative functions must be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without authorization must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really powerful but let's construct it fairly and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese rivals using 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 - of the BBC - have picked to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually decided to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI developers to use developers' content on the internet to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in areas 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 destroying the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The federal government is undermining one of its finest performing industries on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A federal government representative stated: "No relocation will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for right holders to help them certify their material, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a national information library including public information from a wide variety of sources will also be made available to AI scientists.

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 boost the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.

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

This comes as a variety of lawsuits versus AI firms, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have 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 content from the internet without their approval, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of elements which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training information and whether it need to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all adequate 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 established its innovation for a portion of the rate of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, orcz.com I believe that at the minute, if I actually 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 projects. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite hard to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But offered how quickly the tech is evolving, classihub.in I'm uncertain how long I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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

Outside the UK? Register here.