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

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

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

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

It mimics my chatty style of composing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's triggers in collecting information about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on almost 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 contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, because pivoting from assembling 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 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 it, setiathome.berkeley.edu can buy any further copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in any person's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He intends to expand his variety, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to generate, 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 similar content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are talking about data here, we in fact indicate human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is images. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The whole 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 singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks 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 even though the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for imaginative purposes ought to be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without consent must be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really effective but let's develop it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have picked to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use developers' content on the web to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

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

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

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise highly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is weakening among its best performing markets on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made till we are definitely confident we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them license their content, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a national data library consisting of public information from a wide variety of sources will also be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal rules to control AI is now up in the air following President Trump's go back to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to improve the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, prazskypantheon.cz however he is said to want the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a variety of claims against AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have 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 permission, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of factors 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 need to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being 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 cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually want 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 jobs. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts since it's so verbose.

But offered how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure for how long I can remain positive that my substantially slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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