For Christmas I got an interesting present from a buddy - my very own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a couple of simple triggers about me provided by my friend Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of composing, however it's also a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's triggers in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on almost 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 contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, considering that rotating from putting together 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 - just Janet, who created it, can order any further copies.

There is currently no barrier to anybody developing one in anybody's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is meant as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He intends to broaden his variety, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI-generated items to human customers.

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

Musicians, authors, fishtanklive.wiki artists and actors worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar content based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we really suggest human creators' 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 photos. 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 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 developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, pipewiki.org it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for imaginative purposes ought to be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without approval must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really powerful however let's construct it morally and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have chosen to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to utilize creators' content on the web to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

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

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is likewise highly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is undermining among its finest performing industries on the vague pledge of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them license their content, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a national information library consisting of public data from a wide variety of sources will also be made readily available to AI researchers.

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 safety of AI with, among other things, firms in the sector required to share information of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has now been reversed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is said to desire the AI sector to deal with less regulation.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits versus AI companies, 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 claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training information and whether it should be spending for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to contemplate, Chinese AI company 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 claims that it established its technology for a fraction of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But given how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not sure for how long I can stay positive that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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