How An AI-written Book Shows Why The Tech Frightens Creatives

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For Christmas I received a fascinating gift from a friend - my really own "best-selling" book.


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


Yet it was totally written by AI, with a couple of basic triggers about me provided by my buddy Janet.


It's an intriguing read, and extremely funny in parts. But it also 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 also a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's prompts in looking at information about me.


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


There's likewise a strange, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no pets). 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 informed me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, because rotating 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 produce them, based on an open source large language design.


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


There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and pleasure".


Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.


He hopes to broaden his variety, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human customers.


It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound much 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 speaking about data here, we actually imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard creators' rights.


"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. It's artworks. 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 including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists 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 track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.


"I do not think using generative AI for imaginative purposes need to be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without approval ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful but let's develop 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 industry and damages America's swagger


In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually chosen to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have decided to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.


The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to utilize creators' material on the internet to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.


Ed describes this as "madness".


He explains that AI can make advances in areas 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 livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.


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


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


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


A government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made until we are definitely confident we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for right holders to assist them accredit their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."


Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a national information library including public information from a large range of sources will likewise be made 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 boost the safety of AI with, among other things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.


But this has actually now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is said to want the AI sector to deal with less regulation.


This comes as a variety of lawsuits versus AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.


They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.


The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of elements which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it must be paying for it.


If this wasn't all sufficient to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.


DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a fraction of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing supremacy of the sector.


As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.


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


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