tekniknyhet

victorcockle28/tekniknyhet

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 photo on its cover, and it has glowing reviews.

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and uproarious in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, and is someplace in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It imitates my chatty design of composing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and opensourcebridge.science really verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the type of my feline (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 got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, considering that pivoting from assembling 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 upon an open source big language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone creating one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wishes to expand his variety, producing different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and wiki.lafabriquedelalogistique.fr it does, definitely in some parts, sound simply like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar material based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we really imply human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator accc.rcec.sinica.edu.tw of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard creators' 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 after that 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 because it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for creative functions need to be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without authorization must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective however let's construct it fairly and fairly."

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 selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has 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' content on the web to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He explains 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 incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a lot of delight," states 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 industries on the vague guarantee of growth."

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

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a nationwide information library consisting of public information from a vast array of sources will likewise be provided to AI researchers.

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 aimed to improve the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a variety of claims against AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten 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 web without their consent, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore 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 examination over how it gathers training information and whether it must be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it established its innovation for a fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It has lots of and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

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

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the biggest developments in global technology, with analysis from BBC reporters worldwide.

Outside the UK? Register here.