For Christmas I got a fascinating gift from a friend - my very own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a couple of easy triggers about me provided by my friend Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's triggers in collating data about me.

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

There's likewise a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the form 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 chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, considering that rotating from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source large language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in any person's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, developed by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He intends to broaden his range, producing different genres such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human customers.

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

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are talking about information here, we actually suggest human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is images. It's artworks. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to find out 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 because it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer 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 need to be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without consent must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful but let's build it morally and fairly."

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

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to use developers' material on the internet to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

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

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

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

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and an entire lot of pleasure," says the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening among its best carrying out markets on the vague guarantee of growth."

A government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to help them certify their content, access to top quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a nationwide data library containing public information from a large range of sources will also be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules to control 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 security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share details of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of claims against AI firms, and wiki-tb-service.com particularly against OpenAI, 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 companies broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their approval, and utilized it to train their systems.

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

If this wasn't all adequate to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It became the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for a fraction of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I really want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But given how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not sure the length of time I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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