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

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

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

It's an intriguing read, and very 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, bphomesteading.com and very verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collecting data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on nearly 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 got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, considering that 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 firm utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source big language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in anybody's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, created by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold even more.

He hopes to broaden his variety, generating various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human clients.

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

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

"We should be clear, when we are discussing data here, we really imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to discover 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 because it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for innovative functions must be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without approval should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very powerful but let's construct it morally and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have chosen to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He mentions 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 messing up the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also highly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is weakening among its finest performing industries on the vague pledge of development."

A government representative stated: "No relocation will be made till we are definitely positive we have a practical strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them license their content, access to top quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide information library containing public data from a large range of sources will also be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 details of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a variety of suits versus AI companies, 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 comic.

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the web without their permission, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of factors which can make up fair use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training information and whether it should be spending for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It became one of the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

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

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite hard to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure the length of time I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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