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

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

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a few easy triggers about me provided by my buddy Janet.

It's an interesting read, and really funny in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of composing, but it's also a bit recurring, and very verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no pets). 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 got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, given that pivoting from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone producing one in any person's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, developed by AI, and created "solely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is meant as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered even more.

He hopes to widen his range, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because 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 actors worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar material based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are talking about data here, we actually suggest human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to discover how to do something and after that 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 due to the fact that it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe the use of generative AI for imaginative purposes must be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without authorization ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective but let's develop it fairly and relatively."

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

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to utilize creators' content on the web to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations 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 livelihoods 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 markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of happiness," 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 markets on the unclear guarantee of development."

A federal government representative stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a practical strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them certify their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide information library containing public data from a wide variety of sources will likewise be made available 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 enhance the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the 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, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a variety of claims against AI firms, and particularly 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 comedian.

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the web without their permission, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training data and whether it ought to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to consider, Chinese AI firm 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 declares that it established its technology for a portion of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

As for trademarketclassifieds.com me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly desire 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 larger tasks. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to read in parts since it's so verbose.

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

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