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For Christmas I received a fascinating present from a pal - my very own "very popular" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent title) bears my name and my picture on its cover, and it has radiant evaluations.

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a few basic triggers about me supplied by my friend Janet.

It's a fascinating read, and extremely funny in parts. But it also meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It simulates my chatty design of writing, but it's also a bit repeated, and very verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collating data about me.

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

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

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

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, because pivoting from compiling 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 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 more copies.

There is presently no barrier to anybody developing one in anybody's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, produced by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and joy".

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

He intends to broaden his range, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI -generated items to human consumers.

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 generate, and it does, certainly 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 churn out comparable material based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are talking about information here, we really indicate human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is pictures. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to discover how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a tune including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting 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 imaginative purposes must be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without permission should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective however let's construct it ethically and relatively."

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

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to utilize developers' content on the internet to help establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and ruining the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also strongly against removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is weakening one of its finest performing industries on the unclear guarantee of development."

A federal government representative stated: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them license their content, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a national data library including public data from a vast array of sources will also be made 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 intended to improve the security of AI with, asteroidsathome.net to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share information of the workings of their with the US government before they are released.

But this has actually now been rescinded 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 number of claims versus AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, 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 comic.

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the web without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it must be spending for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being the many downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology 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 existing supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm not sure how long I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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