For Christmas I got a fascinating present from a friend - my very own “very popular” book.

“Tech-Splaining for Dummies” (terrific title) bears my name and my picture on its cover, and pyra-handheld.com it has radiant evaluations.

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

It’s a fascinating read, and very funny in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of writing, but it’s also a bit repeated, and really verbose. It might have surpassed Janet’s triggers in collecting information 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 type 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 contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, since 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 firm uses its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source large language design.

I’m not asking you to buy my book. Actually you can’t - only Janet, who produced it, can purchase any further copies.

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in anyone’s name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and created “entirely to bring humour and happiness”.

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is planned as a “customised gag gift”, and the books do not get offered even more.

He wants to broaden his range, generating different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It’s designed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human clients.

It’s also a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have actually revealed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce similar content based upon it.

“We must be clear, when we are talking about information here, we in fact suggest human developers’ life works,” states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect developers’ rights.

“This is books, this is articles, this is photos. It’s artworks. 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 featuring 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 actually not granted it. It didn’t stop the track’s creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

“I do not believe making use of generative AI for creative functions must be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals’s work without consent should be prohibited,” Mr Newton Rex includes. “AI can be really effective however let’s build it ethically and relatively.”

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually selected to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have chosen to team up - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to utilize creators’ material on the web to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as “insanity”.

He explains 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 livelihoods of the country’s creatives,” he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also highly versus removing copyright law for AI.

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

“The federal government is weakening one of its best performing industries on the unclear guarantee of growth.”

A federal government representative said: “No move will be made up until we are absolutely confident we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to assist them license their content, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI developers.”

Under the UK federal government’s brand-new AI strategy, akropolistravel.com a nationwide data library containing public data from a wide variety of sources will likewise be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 boost the security of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector required to share details 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, but he is stated to want the AI sector to deal with less regulation.

This comes as a variety of claims against AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the web without their consent, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under “reasonable usage” and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can constitute reasonable usage - it’s not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training data and whether it need to be paying for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it established its technology for a fraction of the rate of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American’s existing supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I truly want a “bestseller” I’ll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has lots of and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts since it’s so long-winded.

But provided how quickly the tech is progressing, I’m not exactly sure how long I can remain positive that my considerably slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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