For Christmas I received an intriguing present from a friend - my very own "very popular" book.
"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent title) bears my name and my photo on its cover, and it has radiant reviews.
Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a few basic prompts about me supplied by my buddy Janet.
It's an intriguing read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.
It imitates my chatty style of writing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It might have 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 mystical, repetitive 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 companies online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.
When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, wiki.armello.com he informed me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, given that pivoting 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 utilizes its own AI tools to produce them, based upon an open source big language design.
I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - just Janet, who created it, can buy any additional copies.
There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anyone's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and joy".
Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.
He wishes to widen his variety, creating different genres such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI-generated items to human consumers.
It's likewise a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that 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 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 information here, we in fact indicate human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard creators' rights.
"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out how to do something and after that do more like that."
In 2023 a song including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.
"I do not think using generative AI for innovative functions need to be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without authorization need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective however let's build it ethically 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 damages America's swagger
In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have chosen to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.
The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use creators' content on the internet to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.
Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".
He mentions that AI can make advances in locations like defence, parentingliteracy.com healthcare 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 incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.
Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise strongly against removing copyright law for AI.
"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of joy," says the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.
"The federal government is undermining among its best carrying out industries on the unclear pledge of growth."
A government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made till we are definitely confident we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their content, access to premium product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."
Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a national information library including public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise be made readily available to AI researchers.
In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 intended to boost the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the workings 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, but he is said to desire the AI sector to deal with less policy.
This comes as a variety of claims versus AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everyone from the New York 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 internet without their approval, and used it to train their systems.
The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of factors which can make up fair usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training data and whether it need to be spending for it.
If this wasn't all enough to contemplate, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.
DeepSeek declares that it established its technology for a portion of the cost 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 desire 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 bigger tasks. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to read in parts since it's so long-winded.
But provided how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure the length of time I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.
Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the biggest advancements in international innovation, with analysis from BBC reporters all over the world.
Outside the UK? Sign up here.
1
How an AI-written Book Shows why the Tech 'Frightens' Creatives
Alfredo Wollaston edited this page 2025-02-04 04:14:46 -05:00