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

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

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

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

It mimics my chatty style of composing, however it's also a bit repeated, and really verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in collecting data about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no family 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 called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, funsilo.date mainly 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 expenses ₤ 26. The firm utilizes its own AI tools to produce 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 created it, can purchase any further copies.

There is presently no barrier to anyone producing one in any person's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, created by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wants to widen his variety, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human clients.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are talking about data here, we actually suggest human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

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

In 2023 a song including 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 granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe the use of generative AI for innovative functions ought to be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without permission need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective however let's build it fairly and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have picked to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have decided to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

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 changing copyright law and messing up the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a lot of delight," says the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for ribewiki.dk Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining among its best carrying out industries on the unclear promise of growth."

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

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a nationwide data library including public data from a wide range of sources will likewise be 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 increase the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share details of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI firms, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

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

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

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

DeepSeek claims that it established its innovation for a fraction of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I really want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain how long I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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