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

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a few basic prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty style of composing, however it's also a bit recurring, forum.altaycoins.com and extremely verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

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

There are lots of business online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, considering that pivoting 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 uses its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source large language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone creating one in anybody's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, created by AI, and designed "entirely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

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

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

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

"We need to be clear, when we are talking about information here, we really indicate human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is images. It's works of art. 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 song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers 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 actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still .

"I do not think using generative AI for imaginative functions should be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without consent ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective but let's build it morally and fairly."

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

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He explains that AI can make advances in locations 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 ruining the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

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

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

A government representative stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them license their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a national data library containing public data from a large range of sources will also be made offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to manage AI is now up in the air following President Trump's go back to the presidency.

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

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

This comes as a number of suits versus AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their consent, 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 make up fair usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training information and whether it must be paying for it.

If this wasn't all enough to ponder, 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 developed its innovation for a portion of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But offered how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm uncertain the length of time I can remain confident that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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