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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 image on its cover, and it has radiant evaluations.

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

It's an intriguing read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

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

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, grandtribunal.org mainly in the US, given that rotating from compiling 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 upon an open source big language design.

I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - just Janet, who developed it, complexityzoo.net can order any additional 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 material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and pleasure".

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

He hopes to widen his range, producing various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human consumers.

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 create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

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

"We must be clear, when we are talking about information here, we really mean human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is images. It's works of art. 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 tune 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 actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for imaginative purposes need to be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without consent need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's build it morally and relatively."

OpenAI says Chinese rivals using its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

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

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have chosen to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually 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 designers to utilize creators' content on the web to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

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 changing copyright law and messing up the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The federal government is weakening one of its best carrying out industries on the vague promise of development."

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

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a nationwide information library including public data from a broad range of sources will also be made available to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 aimed to enhance the safety of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector required to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been reversed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is said to want the AI sector to face less guideline.

This comes as a number of claims versus AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

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

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of elements which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training data and whether it need to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It became the many downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology for kenpoguy.com a fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite hard to read in parts because it's so verbose.

But given how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm uncertain for how long I can stay confident that my considerably slower human writing and editing skills, parentingliteracy.com are much better.

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