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

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

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a couple of simple prompts about me provided by my buddy Janet.

It's a fascinating read, bio.rogstecnologia.com.br and really amusing in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It simulates my chatty design of composing, however it's also a bit repeated, and very verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of business online offering AI -book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with 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 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 generate them, based on an open source big language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in any person's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get offered further.

He hopes to broaden his variety, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI -generated items to human clients.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

Musicians, 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 must be clear, when we are discussing data here, we really mean human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is images. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to learn how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a song 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 attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for innovative functions should be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without authorization need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really powerful but let's construct it morally and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have selected to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare 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 nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also strongly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of happiness," states the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor forum.altaycoins.com to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining one of its best carrying out markets on the unclear pledge of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made up until we are absolutely confident we have a useful strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to help them certify their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide information library including public information from a large range of sources will also be offered to AI scientists.

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 enhance the security of AI with, among other things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a number of claims versus AI firms, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

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

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore 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 analysis over how it collects training data and whether it must be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It became the many downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a portion of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually want 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 jobs. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to read in parts since it's so verbose.

But offered how quickly the tech is developing, I'm uncertain the length of time I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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