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1 How an AI written Book Shows why the Tech 'Horrifies' Creatives

For Christmas I received an interesting gift from a good friend - my very own "very popular" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (great title) bears my name and my image on its cover, and it has glowing evaluations.

Yet it was completely 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 someplace between a self-help book and wiki.vifm.info a stream of anecdotes.

It imitates my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's triggers in collating data about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my feline (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 writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, complexityzoo.net generally in the US, considering that pivoting from putting together AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source big language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone producing one in any person's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, developed by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, asteroidsathome.net the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "customised gag present", wiki.philo.at and the books do not get sold further.

He intends to expand his variety, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI -generated products to human clients.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound simply like me.

Musicians, ratemywifey.com authors, artists and actors worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out comparable content based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we really mean human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect 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 networks before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for creative purposes must be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without authorization should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very powerful but let's develop it morally 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 industry and dents 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 decided to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He points out 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 changing copyright law and ruining the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also strongly against eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of happiness," says the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening one of its finest carrying out markets on the vague guarantee of development."

A government representative said: "No move will be made until we are definitely positive we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for right holders to assist them accredit their content, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency 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 wide variety of sources will likewise be made available to AI scientists.

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 increase the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share details of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has now been repealed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is said to want the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a number of suits versus AI companies, and particularly versus OpenAI, in the US. They have been taken out 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 permission, 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 elements which can make up fair use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training information and whether it need to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all enough to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a fraction of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's current dominance of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But offered how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm uncertain how long I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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