For Christmas I received an interesting gift from a pal - my very own "best-selling" book.
"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (great title) bears my name and my photo on its cover, and it has glowing evaluations.
Yet it was totally written by AI, with a few simple triggers about me provided by my buddy Janet.
It's a fascinating read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.
It simulates my chatty style of writing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and very verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.
Several sentences start "as a leading innovation reporter ..." - cringe - which might have been scraped from an online bio.
There's likewise a mystical, repeated hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.
There are lots of business online offering AI-book composing 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, generally in the US, because pivoting from putting together 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 upon an open source large language model.
I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - only Janet, who developed it, wiki.cemu.info can buy any additional copies.
There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in anybody's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, created by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".
Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is meant as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.
He wants to broaden his variety, producing different genres such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - offering AI-generated products to human consumers.
It's also a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.
Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar content based upon it.
"We should be clear, when we are talking about information here, we actually 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 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 they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.
"I do not believe making use of generative AI for imaginative purposes ought to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without permission must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective however let's develop it morally and relatively."
OpenAI says Chinese rivals utilizing its work for their AI apps
DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking
China's DeepSeek AI shakes market and dents America's swagger
In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually picked to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. 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 designers to utilize developers' material on the web to help develop their models, unless the rights holders pull out.
Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".
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 destroying the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.
Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is likewise highly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.
"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a whole lot of delight," states the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.
"The government is undermining among its best carrying out industries on the vague promise of growth."
A federal government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are absolutely confident we have a useful strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to assist them certify their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI designers."
Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, thatswhathappened.wiki a national information library consisting of public information from a large range of sources will also be made offered to AI researchers.
In the US the future of federal rules to control AI is now up in the air following President Trump's return to the presidency.
In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to increase the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms 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, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less regulation.
This comes as a variety of suits against AI firms, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everybody from the New york city 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 internet without their approval, and used it to train their systems.
The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of aspects which can make up fair use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training data and whether it ought to be spending for it.
If this wasn't all sufficient to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.
DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for a fraction of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing supremacy of the sector.
When it comes to me and a profession as an author, drapia.org I believe 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 weak point in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.
But given how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm unsure the length of time I can remain positive that my substantially slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.
Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the most significant developments in worldwide innovation, with analysis from BBC correspondents around the globe.
Outside the UK? Register here.
