For Christmas I received an interesting present from a friend - my extremely own "very popular" book.
"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (great 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 basic prompts about me supplied by my good friend Janet.
It's an intriguing read, and uproarious 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 style of writing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's triggers 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 also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no pets). 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, he told me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, given that rotating from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.
A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The firm 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 produced it, can order any additional copies.
There is presently no barrier to anyone producing one in any person's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and joy".
Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is intended as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered even more.
He intends to broaden his range, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human customers.
It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose 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 actors worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable material based upon it.
"We need to be clear, when we are talking about information here, we really imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard developers' rights.
"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to find out how to do something and after that do more like that."
In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And [smfsimple.com](https://www.smfsimple.com/ultimateportaldemo/index.php?action=profile
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How an AI written Book Shows why the Tech 'Terrifies' Creatives
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