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How an AI-written Book Shows why the Tech 'Frightens' Creatives

by Bailey Sawyer (2025-02-07)

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


"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (terrific title) bears my name and my picture on its cover, and it has radiant evaluations.


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


It's an interesting read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders rather a lot, kenpoguy.com and is someplace in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.


It mimics my chatty style of composing, however it's likewise a bit recurring, and really verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating data about me.


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


There's likewise a strange, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my feline (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 contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, considering that pivoting from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 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 produced it, can purchase any further copies.


There is currently no barrier to anybody producing one in anyone's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, produced by AI, users.atw.hu and designed "solely to bring humour and joy".


Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is planned as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get offered further.

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He wishes to expand his range, generating different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human customers.


It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.


Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce similar content based upon it.


"We must be clear, when we are talking about data here, we really imply human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard creators' rights.


"This is books, this is posts, this is images. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to find out how to do something and then do more like that."

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In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and pipewiki.org The Weeknd went viral on social media 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 creator trying to choose it for accc.rcec.sinica.edu.tw a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

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"I do not believe the use of generative AI for innovative functions must be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without permission need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really powerful however let's develop it ethically and relatively."


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 dents America's swagger


In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually selected to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually decided to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for wiki.vst.hs-furtwangen.de example.


The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to utilize creators' content on the internet to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders decide out.


Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".


He explains that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.


"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and destroying the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.


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

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"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a whole lot of delight," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.


"The federal government is undermining one of its finest performing industries on the unclear guarantee of development."


A government spokesperson said: "No move will be made until we are definitely positive we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them certify their material, access to top quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI developers."


Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide information library consisting of public information from a broad variety of sources will also be provided to AI scientists.


In the US the future of federal rules to control AI is now up in the air following President Trump's return to the presidency.


In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to increase the safety of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector required to share information of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are released.


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

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This comes as a number of suits versus AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have 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 material from the web without their authorization, and utilized it to train their systems.

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The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for drapia.org that reason exempt. There are a number of factors which can make up fair use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training data and whether it ought to be spending for it.


If this wasn't all enough to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It became one of the most downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.


DeepSeek claims that it established its innovation for a fraction of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.


When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think 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 weak point in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to read in parts because it's so long-winded.


But provided how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure the length of time I can stay confident that my significantly slower human writing and editing skills, kenpoguy.com are much better.


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