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For Christmas I received an interesting gift from a good friend - my really own "very popular" book.

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

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

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

It imitates my chatty design of composing, however it's also a bit recurring, and extremely verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's triggers in looking at information about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

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

When I called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, considering that pivoting from assembling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source big language model.

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

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

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is meant as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He hopes 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 kind of customer AI - offering AI -generated goods to human customers.

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

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have actually expressed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out comparable material based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are discussing data here, we in fact imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder 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 whole point of AI training is to learn how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song including 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 they had actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for creative purposes ought to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without authorization must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really effective however let's develop it ethically and fairly."

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DeepSeek: The AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and damages America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have selected 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 developer OpenAI for example.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use creators' material on the web to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He explains that AI can make advances in locations like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and destroying the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also strongly versus removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is undermining one of its finest performing industries on the vague promise of growth."

A government representative said: "No move will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a national information library including public data from a wide variety of sources will also be offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 intended to enhance the security of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a number of lawsuits against AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everyone from the New York 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 authorization, 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 is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training data and trademarketclassifieds.com whether it need to be spending for it.

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

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

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

But offered how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not sure for how long I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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