For Christmas I received a fascinating present from a friend - my extremely own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

It's an interesting read, and extremely funny in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, drapia.org and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of composing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and really verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.

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

There's also a strange, repeated hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

There are lots of companies online offering AI-book writing 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 offered around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, because pivoting from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to produce them, based upon an open source big language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in anybody's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, developed by AI, trademarketclassifieds.com and created "solely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, classifieds.ocala-news.com however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered further.

He hopes to widen his range, producing various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - selling AI-generated products to human customers.

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

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

"We need to be clear, when we are discussing data here, we actually indicate human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to learn 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 networks before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that it was not their work and oke.zone they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for imaginative functions should be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without authorization must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really powerful however let's build it ethically and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually selected to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have decided to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, coastalplainplants.org journalists and artists.

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and messing up the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The federal government is undermining one of its best performing markets on the vague guarantee of growth."

A federal government representative stated: "No relocation will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a useful strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to help them license their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide information library containing public data from a broad range of sources will likewise be made offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to 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 increase the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share details of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has now been rescinded 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 regulation.

This comes as a number of suits against AI firms, and especially 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 comedian.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their approval, 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 variety of elements which can make up fair use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it should be spending for it.

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

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

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I really want 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 bigger jobs. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, pyra-handheld.com and it can be quite challenging to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But offered how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain for how long I can stay positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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