For Christmas I received an intriguing present from a good friend - my extremely own "very popular" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent 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 basic prompts about me provided by my friend Janet.

It's an interesting read, and uproarious in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and passfun.awardspace.us is someplace in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It simulates my chatty design of composing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in looking at information about me.

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

There's likewise a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

There are lots of companies online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, since rotating from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The firm uses its own AI tools to produce them, based on an open source big language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, created by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is planned as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get sold even more.

He intends to expand his range, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and possibly offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human clients.

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

Musicians, authors, vetlek.ru artists and actors worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar content based upon it.

"We ought to be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we in fact suggest human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is images. It's works of art. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song including 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 consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for imaginative functions must be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without permission should be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective but let's develop it ethically and fairly."

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 - consisting of the BBC - have chosen to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to utilize developers' material on the internet to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He explains that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and destroying the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also highly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a whole lot of happiness," says the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining among its finest carrying out industries on the unclear promise of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made up until we are absolutely confident we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them certify their content, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide data library consisting of public information from a wide variety of sources will also 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 go back to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to boost the security of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector required to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a number of lawsuits against AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everyone 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 content from the internet without their consent, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can make up reasonable 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 need to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to contemplate, Chinese AI firm 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 price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.

But provided how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain how long I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

Register for ghetto-art-asso.com our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the greatest advancements in international innovation, with analysis from BBC reporters around the globe.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.