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

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a couple of basic triggers about me supplied by my friend Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and uproarious 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, but it's also a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's triggers in collecting data about me.

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

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

There are dozens of business 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 sold around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, because 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 company utilizes its own AI tools to produce them, based on an open source big language design.

I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - just Janet, who developed it, can order any more copies.

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in any person's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, produced by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

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

He intends to expand his range, generating various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound simply 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 discussing data here, we really suggest human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is photos. It's artworks. 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 song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for innovative functions should be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without consent need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful however let's construct it fairly and relatively."

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

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to use on the internet to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He explains that AI can make advances in areas 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 messing up the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of happiness," states the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening one of its best carrying out industries on the unclear pledge of growth."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made until we are definitely confident we have a practical strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them accredit their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide information library including public information from a vast array of sources will likewise be provided 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 aimed to boost the safety of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector required to share details of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less guideline.

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

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the web without their permission, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and timeoftheworld.date are for that reason exempt. There are a number of elements which can constitute reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and whether it ought to be paying for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it developed 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 existing dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually want 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 projects. It is complete of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm uncertain how long I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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