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

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

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a few easy prompts about me provided by my good friend Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

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

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

There's likewise a strange, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

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

When I contacted the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, primarily 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 buy my book. Actually you can't - only Janet, who produced it, can buy any more copies.

There is currently no barrier to anybody producing one in anybody's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, created by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and pleasure".

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

He wants to broaden his variety, thatswhathappened.wiki producing different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human consumers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we really suggest human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is images. It's masterpieces. 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 featuring 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 consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for creative purposes must be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without approval need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely powerful but let's build it fairly and relatively."

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

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use creators' content on the internet to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex 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 ruining the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The government is undermining one of its best carrying out industries on the vague pledge of growth."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made till we are absolutely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them license their material, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide data library consisting of public data from a broad range of sources will likewise be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 aimed to increase the security of AI with, among other things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a number of suits against AI companies, larsaluarna.se and especially versus OpenAI, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

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

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

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation 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.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

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

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