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

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, securityholes.science with a few easy prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

It's an interesting read, setiathome.berkeley.edu and uproarious in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It simulates my chatty design of writing, but it's also a bit repeated, and very verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in looking at information about me.

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

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

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised 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 uses its own AI tools to produce 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 produced it, can order any further copies.

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, consisting of celebrities - 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 "entirely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is planned as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold even more.

He hopes to broaden his variety, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human customers.

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

Musicians, kenpoguy.com authors, artists and actors worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce similar content based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are discussing data here, we really imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is photos. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists 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 consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for creative purposes ought to be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without consent ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely powerful but let's construct it ethically and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have picked to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use developers' content on the internet to assist develop their models, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He points out 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 messing up 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 markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a lot of delight," says the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening among its finest performing industries on the vague pledge of development."

A federal government representative said: "No relocation will be made up until we are absolutely confident we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them accredit their content, access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a national information library consisting of public data from a broad range of sources will also be offered to AI scientists.

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 intended to boost the safety of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a number of suits versus AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everybody from the New york city 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 web without their permission, and used 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 variety of elements which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training data and whether it ought to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to contemplate, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being the many downloaded 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 actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain for how long I can stay positive that my significantly slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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