For Christmas I received a fascinating present from a friend - my really own "very popular" book.
"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent title) bears my name and my picture on its cover, and it has glowing reviews.
Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a couple of basic triggers about me supplied by my good friend Janet.
It's an interesting read, and uproarious in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.
It imitates my chatty style of writing, however it's also a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's triggers in collating data about me.
Several sentences start "as a leading technology journalist ..." - cringe - which might have been scraped from an online bio.
There's likewise a strange, repetitive hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.
There are dozens of companies online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.
When I got in touch with the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, considering that pivoting from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.
A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The firm utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source large language design.
I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - only Janet, who produced it, can purchase any additional copies.
There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in any person's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, created by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and happiness".
Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is meant as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.
He intends to broaden his range, creating different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - offering AI-generated items to human customers.
It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to create, wiki.vifm.info and it does, definitely in some parts, sound much like me.
Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have 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 data here, we in fact suggest human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect developers' rights.
"This is books, this is articles, this is images. It's masterpieces. 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 song including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.
"I do not believe making use of generative AI for creative purposes should be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without approval ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very powerful however let's construct it ethically and relatively."
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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually selected to block AI designers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have chosen to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.
The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to utilize creators' content on the internet to assist develop their models, unless the rights holders pull out.
Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".
He explains that AI can make advances in areas like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.
"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and ruining the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.
Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is likewise highly versus removing copyright law for AI.
"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and an entire lot of joy," states the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.
"The government is undermining one of its best carrying out industries on the vague pledge of growth."
A government spokesperson said: "No move will be made till we are definitely positive we have a useful strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them certify their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI designers."
Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a national information library including public data from a large range of sources will likewise be provided to AI scientists.
In the US the future of federal rules 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 improve the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share information of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.
But this has now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is said to desire the AI sector to face less guideline.
This comes as a variety of lawsuits versus AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.
They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the web without their permission, and utilized it to train their systems.
The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of factors which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training information and whether it should be paying for it.
If this wasn't all enough to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It became one of 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 similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, oke.zone and threatens American's current dominance of the sector.
When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.
But provided how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not exactly sure for how long I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.
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