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

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a few simple prompts about me provided by my pal 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 simulates my chatty design of composing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collecting information about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically 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 called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, considering that pivoting from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The firm uses its own AI tools to produce them, based upon an open source large language model.

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

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

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get sold even more.

He intends to broaden his variety, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human consumers.

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

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

"We must be clear, when we are discussing data here, we actually indicate human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's masterpieces. 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 including 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 not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer 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 think using generative AI for innovative purposes should be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without authorization need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful however let's construct it ethically and fairly."

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

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have actually decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use developers' material on the web to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

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

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

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a whole lot of joy," says the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for parentingliteracy.com Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining one of its best carrying out markets on the unclear promise of growth."

A government representative said: "No move will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a practical plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to assist them accredit their material, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide data library including public data from a wide variety of sources will likewise be made readily available 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 intended to enhance the security of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has actually now been rescinded by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is stated to want the AI sector to deal with less regulation.

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

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

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of elements which can constitute fair use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training information and whether it ought to be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a portion of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for kenpoguy.com Dummies highlights the existing weak point in AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to read in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But offered how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure for how long I can stay positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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