For Christmas I received a fascinating present from a buddy - my really own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a couple of basic triggers about me provided by my good friend Janet.

It's a fascinating read, and uproarious in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

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

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

There's likewise a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly 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 told me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, considering 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 company uses its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source large language design.

I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - just Janet, who developed it, can order any more copies.

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in anyone's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, produced by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is planned as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wishes to broaden his range, generating various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - offering AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound just like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have expressed 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 speaking about information here, we in fact indicate human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

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

In 2023 a song including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers 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 creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for imaginative functions should be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without permission ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective however let's develop it morally 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 material for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to utilize developers' content on the internet to help develop their designs, 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 without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

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

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

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of joy," says the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining one of its best performing markets on the unclear promise of development."

A government spokesperson said: "No move will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them license their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a national data library containing public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise 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 go back to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to improve the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has now been repealed by Trump. It stays 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 variety of claims against AI firms, kenpoguy.com and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have 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 material from the web without their permission, and utilized 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 aspects which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training data and whether it need to be spending for it.

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

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

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure how long I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and modifying abilities, are much better.

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