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

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a few basic prompts about me provided by my good friend Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty design of composing, forum.altaycoins.com but it's also a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in looking at information about me.

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

There's also a strange, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr repeated hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no pets). 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 called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised 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 expenses ₤ 26. The firm utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based upon an open source big language model.

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 any person's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is intended as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He wants to broaden his range, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI -generated products to human customers.

It's likewise a bit scary 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 much like me.

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

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

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

In 2023 a tune featuring AI -generated voices of 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 although the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

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

OpenAI says Chinese competitors using its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and damages America's swagger

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

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to utilize developers' content on the internet to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations 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 incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is also strongly against removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of delight," states the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening among its finest performing markets on the vague pledge of growth."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to assist them license their material, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a national information library containing public information from a large range of sources will likewise be made offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal rules to manage 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 enhance the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

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

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their approval, and wiki.armello.com used it to train their systems.

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

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

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

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, forum.pinoo.com.tr and it can be quite tough to read in parts because it's so verbose.

But provided how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm not sure how long I can remain confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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