yyxxgame

zmljeanett0997/yyxxgame

For Christmas I got an interesting gift from a pal - my extremely own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a couple of simple prompts about me supplied by my friend 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 writing, but it's also a bit repeated, yewiki.org and very verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

There are lots of business online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, since rotating from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The firm uses its own AI tools to generate 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 order any further 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 violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, developed by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is planned as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get offered further.

He wishes to expand his range, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human consumers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

Musicians, systemcheck-wiki.de authors, artists and actors worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then churn out comparable content based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are talking about information here, we in fact imply human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is photos. It's artworks. 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 featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers 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 granted it. It didn't stop the attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

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

OpenAI states Chinese competitors using its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese 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 chosen to block AI designers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have actually decided to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for trademarketclassifieds.com instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to utilize developers' material on the internet to help establish their models, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations 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 messing up the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also strongly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of happiness," states the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening one of its best carrying out industries on the vague guarantee of development."

A government representative said: "No move will be made until we are definitely positive we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them accredit their content, access to top quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a national information library including public data from a large range of sources will likewise be 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 aimed to enhance the safety of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is stated to want the AI sector to face less guideline.

This comes as a number of suits versus AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everyone from the New york city 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 web without their permission, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training data and whether it must be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It became one of the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a fraction 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.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for larger projects. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not sure how long I can stay confident that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the greatest developments in international innovation, with analysis from BBC correspondents all over the world.

Outside the UK? Register here.