For Christmas I got a fascinating present from a good friend - my extremely own "very popular" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (terrific 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 basic prompts about me provided by my good friend Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit repeated, and very verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in looking at information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of companies online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, surgiteams.com he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, considering that rotating from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The firm utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source large language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody developing one in anyone's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, created by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is intended as a "personalised gag present", asteroidsathome.net and the books do not get offered even more.

He wants to expand his variety, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human customers.

It's likewise a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and videochatforum.ro it does, definitely in some parts, sound much like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being used to AI tools that then churn out comparable material based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are discussing data here, we actually suggest human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

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

In 2023 a tune featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and 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 trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for innovative purposes need to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without consent should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful however let's construct it morally and relatively."

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

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He points out 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 livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also highly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of delight," says the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining one of its finest performing markets on the unclear pledge of growth."

A government representative said: "No relocation will be made till we are definitely positive we have a useful plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them accredit their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide information library including public data from a large range 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 return to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to improve the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is stated to want the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

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 city Times to authors, music labels, wiki-tb-service.com and even a comedian.

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

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training data and whether it should be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It became the many downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

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

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain the length of time I can stay confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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