For visualchemy.gallery Christmas I received an interesting present from a good friend - my extremely own "best-selling" book.

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

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

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

It imitates my chatty design of writing, but it's also a bit recurring, and photorum.eclat-mauve.fr very verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in collating 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 feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of business online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, since rotating 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 create them, based on an open source large language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody producing one in anyone's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, created by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

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

He wants to expand his variety, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human clients.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely 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 churn out comparable material based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are talking about data here, we in fact suggest human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. It's artworks. 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 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 actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for imaginative functions need to be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without approval should be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely powerful 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 designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to utilize developers' content on the web to assist develop their models, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He explains that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care 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 livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of pleasure," says the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining one of its finest carrying out markets on the vague promise of growth."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made till we are absolutely positive we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them certify 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 new AI plan, a national information library consisting of public data from a large range of sources will also be provided to AI researchers.

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

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to enhance the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a number of suits versus AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, grandtribunal.org continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the web without their consent, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair 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 scrutiny over how it collects training information and whether it must be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a fraction of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has lots of inaccuracies and pipewiki.org hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

But given how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not exactly sure the length of time I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

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