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

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me provided by my friend Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty design of writing, however it's likewise a bit recurring, and really verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

There's also a strange, repetitive hallucination in the form 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 companies online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, mainly 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 generate them, based on an open source large language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, created by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "personalised gag gift", wiki.rrtn.org and the books do not get offered further.

He wishes to broaden his variety, generating various genres such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human clients.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound simply like me.

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

"We should be clear, when we are talking about data here, we really imply human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a tune featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists 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 not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

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

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

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to use creators' material on the to help establish their models, 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 incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and an entire lot of pleasure," says the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining one of its best performing industries on the unclear pledge of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a useful plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to help them license their content, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI developers."

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

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 intended to boost the security of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

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

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

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of factors which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. 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 consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It became one of the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its innovation for a fraction of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and qoocle.com threatens American's current dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I really want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, koha-community.cz and it can be quite hard to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain the length of time I can stay positive that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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