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

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent title) bears my name and my picture on its cover, hb9lc.org and it has glowing evaluations.

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a few simple prompts about me by my pal Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty style of writing, but it's likewise a bit repeated, and really verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically 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 president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, since pivoting from assembling 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 create them, shiapedia.1god.org based upon an open source big language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody developing one in anybody's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, created by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He hopes to broaden his variety, creating different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI-generated products to human consumers.

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

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are talking about data here, we really imply human developers' life works," says 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 masterpieces. 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 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 not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for innovative functions ought to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without authorization ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really effective but let's build it ethically and fairly."

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DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and dents America's swagger

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

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI developers to use creators' content on the internet to assist develop their models, bphomesteading.com unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care 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 also strongly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is undermining one of its finest performing markets on the unclear promise of development."

A government representative stated: "No relocation will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for right holders to help them accredit their content, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide information library containing public information from a wide variety of sources will also be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to manage 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 improve the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share information of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is said to want the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, e.bike.free.fr and even a comic.

They declare that the AI firms 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 "reasonable use" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and whether it should be spending for it.

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

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

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, setiathome.berkeley.edu if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It is full of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

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

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