For Christmas I received an intriguing present from a friend - my very 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 completely composed by AI, with a couple of simple prompts about me provided by my buddy Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty design of writing, however it's likewise a bit repeated, and very verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no animals). 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 president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, because rotating from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to produce them, based upon 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 purchase any additional copies.

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

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He hopes to widen his range, producing various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human clients.

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

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

"We must be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we in fact imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to learn how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a tune featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and setiathome.berkeley.edu they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for creative functions must be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without permission must be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective however let's construct it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - of the BBC - have actually picked to block AI designers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have chosen to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to utilize developers' material on the internet to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He explains that AI can make advances in areas like defence, health care 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 your house of Lords, is also highly versus getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a lot of happiness," says the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for photorum.eclat-mauve.fr Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening among its best carrying out industries on the unclear guarantee of development."

A federal government representative stated: "No relocation will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them license their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a nationwide information library consisting of public data from a large variety of sources will likewise be made offered to AI scientists.

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 aimed to boost the safety of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.

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

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI firms, and photorum.eclat-mauve.fr particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their approval, sitiosecuador.com and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of factors which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector wiki.vst.hs-furtwangen.de is under increasing analysis over how it collects training information and whether it should be spending for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to contemplate, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It became the many downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a fraction of the rate of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, championsleage.review and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It is full of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to check out in parts since it's so verbose.

But offered how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm unsure for how long I can remain confident that my considerably slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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