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

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a few simple prompts about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit repeated, and very verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's triggers in looking at information about me.

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

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

There are lots of companies online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, because rotating from assembling 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 create 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 developed it, can order any further copies.

There is currently no barrier to anybody producing one in anybody's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, created by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is planned as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He wants to broaden his variety, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We should be clear, when we are discussing information here, we actually suggest human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to discover how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a tune including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media 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 developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, wiki-tb-service.com it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for creative purposes need to be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without permission need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful however let's construct it ethically and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have selected to block AI designers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator wiki.myamens.com OpenAI for instance.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He explains that AI can make advances in locations 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 livelihoods of the nation'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 industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a lot of happiness," states the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining among its best performing industries on the unclear guarantee of development."

A federal government representative stated: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them certify their content, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide information library including public data from a vast array of sources will also be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal rules to manage AI is now up in the air following President Trump's return to the presidency.

In 2023 an executive order that intended to increase the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been reversed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is stated to want the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a number of lawsuits against AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everybody 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 content from the web without their consent, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of elements which can constitute reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training information and whether it must be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the a lot of downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it established its innovation for a portion of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

As for me and hikvisiondb.webcam a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But provided how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain the length of time I can remain confident that my considerably slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

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