gotuby

For Christmas I got an intriguing gift from a good friend - my really own "very popular" 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 triggers about me provided by my pal Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders quite 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 likewise a bit recurring, and really verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

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

There's likewise a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on practically 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 primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, since pivoting from assembling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to produce them, based on an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in anyone's name, consisting of stars - 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 designed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is intended as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He wants to broaden his range, generating various genres such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI -generated products to human consumers.

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

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have actually expressed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable content based upon it.

"We ought to be clear, when we are discussing data here, we actually imply human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to learn how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song 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 consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still .

"I do not believe using generative AI for creative purposes should be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without consent should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective but let's construct it morally and fairly."

OpenAI says Chinese competitors utilizing 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 selected to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have chosen to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to utilize creators' material on the internet to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

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 changing copyright law and destroying the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise strongly versus removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is undermining among its finest performing industries on the vague guarantee of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a practical plan that delivers 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 federal government's new AI plan, a nationwide data library including public data from a wide range of sources will likewise be provided to AI scientists.

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 intended to improve the safety of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has actually now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is stated to want the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everybody from the New york city 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, akropolistravel.com and utilized it to train their systems.

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

If this wasn't all sufficient to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It became the a lot of downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for a fraction of the rate of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I actually want 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 tasks. It has lots of inaccuracies 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 evolving, I'm not exactly sure for how long I can remain confident that my considerably slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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

Outside the UK? Register here.