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  • Adrienne Angles
  • pecanchoice
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  • #40

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Created Feb 15, 2025 by Adrienne Angles@adrienneanglesMaintainer

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


For Christmas I got an intriguing gift from a buddy - my really own "very popular" book.

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

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

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

It simulates my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit recurring, and really verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in looking at data 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 family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

There are lots of business online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, considering that pivoting 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, videochatforum.ro based on an open source large language model.

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

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

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr that the item is planned as a "customised gag gift", classifieds.ocala-news.com and the books do not get offered further.

He hopes to expand his range, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated items to human customers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it most likely 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 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 in fact suggest human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is images. It's works of art. 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 tune including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and wiki.dulovic.tech The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for innovative purposes should be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without consent need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really effective but let's construct it fairly 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 - consisting of the BBC - have actually picked to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have decided to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to use creators' material on the internet to help develop their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He mentions 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 ruining the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The government is weakening among its best performing markets on the unclear guarantee of development."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely positive we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them certify their material, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a national information library consisting of public information from a broad variety of sources will also be made offered to AI researchers.

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

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to increase the security of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector required to share details of the workings 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 stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less policy.

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

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

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

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

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a portion of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

As for wiki.snooze-hotelsoftware.de me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But provided how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain the length of time I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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