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For Christmas I got a fascinating 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 glowing reviews.

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a few simple triggers about me provided by my buddy Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty style of writing, however it's likewise a bit repeated, and very verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's triggers in collating information about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repeated 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 writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, considering that pivoting from compiling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The firm utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone creating one in anybody's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, developed by AI, and designed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He intends to broaden his range, creating different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI -generated items to human customers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound much like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then churn out comparable content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we actually imply human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

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

In 2023 a song featuring AI -generated voices of singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks 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 creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe the use of generative AI for creative functions must be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without authorization should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very powerful but let's build it morally and relatively."

OpenAI says Chinese competitors utilizing 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 block AI designers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have decided to team up - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI developers to utilize developers' content on the internet to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex describes 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 destroying the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is likewise highly against eliminating copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is weakening one of its best carrying out markets on the vague pledge of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made till we are definitely positive we have a practical strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to assist them license their content, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide data library consisting of public information from a wide variety of sources will also be offered to AI researchers.

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 intended to boost the safety of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector required to share details of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.

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

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

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the web without their permission, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of factors which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and whether it should be paying for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its technology for a portion of the rate of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

But offered how quickly the tech is evolving, orcz.com I'm not exactly sure how long I can stay confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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