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

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a couple of simple prompts about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and very funny in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

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

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

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

There are lots 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 actually sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, because 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 company utilizes its own AI tools to generate them, 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 buy any further copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in any person's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold even more.

He intends to widen his range, producing different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably 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 actually revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out comparable material based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are talking about data here, we actually mean human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to learn how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And forum.batman.gainedge.org despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for creative functions need to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without approval ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really effective but let's build it morally and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually chosen to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have decided to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI developers to utilize creators' content on the internet to help develop their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and ruining the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and an entire 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 among its finest carrying out industries on the vague pledge of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their content, 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 federal government's new AI plan, a national information library including public information from a broad range of sources will likewise be provided to AI scientists.

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

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

This comes as a number of suits against AI firms, and especially 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 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 companies argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of aspects 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 data and whether it need to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all enough to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It became one of the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its technology for a fraction of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's current dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm not sure the length of time I can remain positive that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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