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For Christmas I received an intriguing gift from a friend - my really own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a few basic prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty style of writing, but it's likewise a bit repeated, and really verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of companies online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, since pivoting from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in any person's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, created by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is meant as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He wishes to expand his range, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an . It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI -generated items to human customers.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound just like me.

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

"We must be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we in fact mean human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect 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 after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song including AI -generated voices of Canadian singers 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 creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for innovative purposes must be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without permission must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective but let's develop it fairly and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have decided to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and ruining the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is likewise strongly versus getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of pleasure," states the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining among its finest carrying out industries on the vague guarantee of development."

A government representative said: "No move will be made until we are definitely positive we have a useful plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for right holders to assist them certify their material, access to top quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide information library consisting of public information from a wide variety 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 go back to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to increase the safety of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share information 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 stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less regulation.

This comes as a variety of suits against AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, kenpoguy.com and even a comic.

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the web without their permission, and equipifieds.com utilized 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 number of aspects which can constitute fair use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training information and whether it need to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to ponder, 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 claims that it established its innovation for a fraction of the rate of the similarity 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 profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I really want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to check out in parts since it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain for how long I can remain confident that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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