For Christmas I got an interesting gift from a good friend - my very own "very popular" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (great title) bears my name and my photo on its cover, and it has glowing reviews.

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me provided by my friend Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty design of writing, but it's also a bit repetitive, garagesale.es and extremely verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's triggers in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

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

When I called the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, given that pivoting from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone producing one in any person's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, created by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is meant as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He intends to widen his range, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have actually revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out comparable material based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are discussing information here, we in fact imply human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is photos. It's works of art. 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 tune featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists 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 attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for imaginative purposes ought to be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without consent ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really powerful however let's construct it ethically and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually chosen to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have decided to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator classifieds.ocala-news.com OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use creators' content on the internet to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

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

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and ruining the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is likewise strongly against eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal 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 performing markets on the unclear guarantee of development."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them accredit their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a national information library including public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise be provided to AI researchers.

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

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to enhance the safety of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are .

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

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, oke.zone music labels, and even a comedian.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their consent, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of factors which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training information and whether it should be spending for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It became the a lot of downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

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

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I really want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite hard to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But offered how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure how long I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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