For Christmas I received an intriguing present from a buddy - my really own "very popular" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (fantastic title) bears my name and my photo 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 uproarious in parts. But it also meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It simulates my chatty design of writing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, wavedream.wiki and very verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collecting information about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repetitive hallucination in the form 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 composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily 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 firm utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based upon an open source large language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone producing one in anyone's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is planned as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered even more.

He intends to expand his variety, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - selling AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound simply like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have actually revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then produce similar content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are discussing information here, we really mean human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is images. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media 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 creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for creative functions ought to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without approval need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really powerful however let's build it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have chosen to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to utilize creators' material on the internet to help establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He points out 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 altering copyright law and ruining the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a lot of joy," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining one of its best carrying out industries on the vague promise of development."

A government spokesperson said: "No move will be made until we are definitely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them accredit their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a nationwide information library including public information from a vast array of sources will likewise be offered to AI researchers.

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

But this has now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is said to desire the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a number of suits versus AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their consent, and utilized 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 factors which can make up fair usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training data and whether it must be spending for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology for a fraction of the rate of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually 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 think that at the moment, if I really want 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 bigger jobs. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts because it's so verbose.

But offered how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure how long I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are much better.

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