For Christmas I received an interesting present from a friend - my really own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me provided by my good friend Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty style of writing, but it's likewise a bit repeated, and really verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no family pets). And bbarlock.com there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

There are lots of business 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 told me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, because pivoting from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anyone's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, produced by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is planned as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He hopes to widen his range, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human customers.

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

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

"We should be clear, when we are talking about information here, we in fact mean human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is images. 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 song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers 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 they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for creative functions need to be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without authorization must be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really effective however let's develop it morally and fairly."

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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 . Others have decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to utilize developers' material on the internet to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

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 changing copyright law and destroying the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is likewise strongly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of joy," says the Baroness, who is likewise 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 vague pledge of development."

A federal government representative stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for right holders to help them certify their material, access to premium product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a national information library containing public information from a wide range of sources will likewise be made readily available to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 improve the safety of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of lawsuits versus AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out 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 material from the web without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of aspects which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training information and whether it ought to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded totally 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 raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, kenpoguy.com I believe that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But provided how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not sure for linked.aub.edu.lb how long I can stay confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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