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

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a couple of easy triggers about me supplied by my pal Janet.

It's an interesting read, and extremely amusing in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and photorum.eclat-mauve.fr is somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It imitates my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit repetitive, asteroidsathome.net and very verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in looking at information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on practically 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 called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, considering that pivoting 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 uses its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source big language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anyone's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, created by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get sold even more.

He wants to broaden his variety, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI-generated products to human consumers.

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

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

"We must be clear, when we are talking about data here, we really mean human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. It's works of art. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to learn how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a tune featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and lespoetesbizarres.free.fr The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that it was not their work and they had actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for imaginative functions must be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without consent should be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective but let's build it ethically and fairly."

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In the UK some including the BBC - have selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have chosen to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

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

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

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

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

"The government is undermining among its finest performing industries on the vague promise of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them accredit their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a national information library containing public data from a large range of sources will also be provided to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 intended to increase the safety 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 federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a variety of lawsuits versus AI firms, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

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

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of aspects which can constitute reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and whether it must be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for a portion of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a career 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 existing weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, archmageriseswiki.com and it can be quite challenging to read in parts since it's so verbose.

But given how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure the length of time I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are much better.

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