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For Christmas I got an interesting gift from a buddy - my really own "very popular" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (great title) bears my name and my photo on its cover, and it has glowing evaluations.

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a couple of basic prompts about me provided by my good friend Janet.

It's a fascinating read, and very amusing in parts. But it also meanders rather a lot, wiki.die-karte-bitte.de and is somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It imitates my chatty design of composing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no 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 called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, since rotating from compiling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to generate them, based on an open source big language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anybody's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, created by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is planned as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He hopes to expand his range, generating various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI -generated items 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 generate, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then produce similar material based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are discussing data here, we in fact suggest human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard 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 discover 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 media before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the were fake, it was still extremely popular.

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

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DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

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

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

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use developers' content on the web to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders pull 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 messing up the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is also highly versus getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is undermining one of its finest carrying out industries on the vague pledge of growth."

A government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made till we are definitely confident we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them certify their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a national data library containing public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise be made readily available to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to control AI is now up in the air following President Trump's go back to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to improve the safety of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI companies, empireofember.com and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everyone from the New york city 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 internet without their consent, and bphomesteading.com used 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 usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training information and whether it need to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all enough to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has 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 claims that it developed its technology 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 existing supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It is complete of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to read in parts because it's so verbose.

But given how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure the length of time I can remain confident that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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