Skip to content

  • Projects
  • Groups
  • Snippets
  • Help
    • Loading...
    • Help
    • Contribute to GitLab
  • Sign in / Register
T
taraazi
  • Project
    • Project
    • Details
    • Activity
    • Cycle Analytics
  • Issues 1
    • Issues 1
    • List
    • Board
    • Labels
    • Milestones
  • Merge Requests 0
    • Merge Requests 0
  • CI / CD
    • CI / CD
    • Pipelines
    • Jobs
    • Schedules
  • Wiki
    • Wiki
  • Snippets
    • Snippets
  • Members
    • Members
  • Collapse sidebar
  • Activity
  • Create a new issue
  • Jobs
  • Issue Boards
  • Richie Buckner
  • taraazi
  • Issues
  • #1

You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Closed
Open
Opened Feb 09, 2025 by Richie Buckner@richiebuckner2
  • Report abuse
  • New issue
Report abuse New issue

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


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

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

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

It's a fascinating read, and very amusing in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is someplace in between a self-help book and pipewiki.org a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of composing, however it's likewise a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

There's also a strange, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (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 chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, gratisafhalen.be since rotating from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody developing one in anybody's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, created by AI, and designed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

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

He wishes to expand his range, producing different genres such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI-generated items to human customers.

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

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

"We must be clear, when we are discussing information here, we really indicate human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a song including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for imaginative functions must be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without approval must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really effective but let's build it ethically and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese rivals utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes market and damages America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually picked to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually chosen to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to use developers' content on the web to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He explains 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 messing up the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The federal government is weakening among its finest carrying out industries on the unclear pledge of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made till we are absolutely positive we have a useful plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for right holders to assist them certify their content, access to premium product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a national information library consisting of public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise be provided 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 intended to boost the security of AI with, amongst other things, bytes-the-dust.com firms in the sector needed to share details of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.

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

This comes as a number of lawsuits versus AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their consent, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of factors which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training information and whether it ought 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 one of the most downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

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

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts since it's so verbose.

But offered how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not sure the length of time I can remain confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the greatest advancements in worldwide innovation, wiki.vifm.info with analysis from BBC correspondents all over the world.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.

Assignee
Assign to
None
Milestone
None
Assign milestone
Time tracking
None
Due date
No due date
0
Labels
None
Assign labels
  • View project labels
Reference: richiebuckner2/taraazi#1