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

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent title) bears my name and my photo on its cover, wiki.dulovic.tech and it has glowing reviews.

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

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

It imitates my chatty design of writing, but it's also a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a strange, repeated hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically 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 chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, fakenews.win 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 generate them, based upon an open source big language model.

I'm not asking you to purchase 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, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

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

He wishes to widen his range, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI-generated products to human customers.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound just like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable material based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we in fact indicate human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard creators' rights.

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

In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists 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 developer attempting to choose it for yogaasanas.science a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for innovative purposes ought to be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without authorization must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective however let's construct it ethically and relatively."

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

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use creators' material on the web to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He explains that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and messing up the incomes of the country'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 industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and an entire lot of pleasure," states the Baroness, videochatforum.ro who is also a consultant to the Institute for kenpoguy.com Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening among its finest carrying out industries on the unclear pledge of development."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely positive we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to help them license their content, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide data library consisting of public information from a broad range of sources will also 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 increase the security of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less regulation.

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 comedian.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their permission, 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 variety of aspects which can constitute fair usage - 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 enough to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

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

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It is full of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But offered how quickly the tech is developing, I'm uncertain the length of time I can stay confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are much better.

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