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

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

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

It's a fascinating read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders quite 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 also a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's triggers in collecting information about me.

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

There's also a strange, repetitive hallucination in the form of my feline (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 composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, since rotating from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in anyone's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, created by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and joy".

Legally, demo.qkseo.in the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered even more.

He intends to broaden his variety, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and possibly offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI-generated items to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound just like me.

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

"We need to be clear, when we are discussing information here, we really mean human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. It's artworks. 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 song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers 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 granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator 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 believe the use of generative AI for innovative functions ought to be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without approval should be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's build it fairly and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually selected to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have chosen to team up - 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 models, 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 destroying the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also highly versus removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is weakening one of its best performing markets on the vague pledge of development."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: 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 best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a national information library including public data from a broad range of sources will also be made readily available to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 intended to increase the safety of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a number of claims versus AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everybody 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 utilized it to train their systems.

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

If this wasn't all enough to contemplate, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the a lot of downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology for a portion of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, wiki.rrtn.org and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to read in parts because it's so verbose.

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

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