For Christmas I received an interesting present from a friend - 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 evaluations.

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a couple of simple prompts about me supplied by my buddy Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty design of composing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's triggers in collecting data about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repeated hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no animals). 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 contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, shiapedia.1god.org he told me he had sold around 150,000 customised 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 costs ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source big language model.

I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - only Janet, who produced it, can order any additional copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone producing one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is planned as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He hopes to widen his range, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human clients.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to produce, and wiki.monnaie-libre.fr it does, definitely in some parts, sound much like me.

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

"We must be clear, when we are talking about information here, we actually imply human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is pictures. It's artworks. 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 networks before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not granted 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 fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for imaginative functions should be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without authorization need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective however let's develop it fairly and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have chosen to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to utilize developers' material on the internet to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

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

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

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also highly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is weakening one of its best carrying out industries on the vague pledge of development."

A federal government representative stated: "No move will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for ideal 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 developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a national information library including public data from a broad variety of sources will likewise be made readily available to AI scientists.

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

But this has now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, online-learning-initiative.org however he is stated to want the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

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 variety of factors which can make up fair use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training information and whether it must be paying for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for a portion of the rate of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for iwatex.com Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

But provided how quickly the tech is developing, I'm not exactly sure for how long I can stay positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are much better.

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