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

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a few easy triggers about me supplied by my pal Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty style of writing, however it's likewise a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's triggers in collecting data about me.

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

There's likewise a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the form of my cat (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 president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, considering that rotating from putting together 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 generate them, based upon an open source big language design.

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 developing one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, produced by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and macphersonwiki.mywikis.wiki the books do not get sold further.

He intends to expand his variety, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's also a bit scary 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 simply 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 ought to be clear, when we are discussing information here, we actually suggest human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies 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 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 since it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for creative functions ought to be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without consent need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really powerful however let's build it morally and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually picked to obstruct AI designers 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 instance.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to content on the internet to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He points out that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and destroying the livelihoods 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 a great deal of pleasure," says the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening among its finest performing markets on the unclear promise of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them license their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a national information library containing public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise be 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 aimed to improve the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share information of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less guideline.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits versus AI companies, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everyone 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 material from the internet without their consent, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training data and whether it must be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology for a fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure how long I can remain confident that my considerably slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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