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

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent title) bears my name and my image on its cover, and it has radiant evaluations.

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

It's an interesting read, and very amusing in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of writing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's triggers in collating information about me.

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

There's also a strange, 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 companies online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, since rotating from 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 produce them, based upon an open source big language model.

I'm not asking you to buy my book. Actually you can't - just Janet, oke.zone who produced it, can order any further copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anyone's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He wants to widen his range, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and oke.zone possibly offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

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

"We must be clear, when we are discussing data here, we in fact suggest human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, wiki.tld-wars.space which campaigns for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is pictures. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to learn how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a tune featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks 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 attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for imaginative functions must be banned, but I do think 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 effective but let's build it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have decided to team up - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI developers to utilize creators' content on the web to help develop their models, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He explains that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare 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 livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of happiness," says the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening one of its best performing markets on the vague promise of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made until we are definitely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them certify their content, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide data library containing public information from a wide variety of sources will also be provided to AI scientists.

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 intended to improve the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a number of claims against AI companies, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out 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 internet without their consent, and used it to train their systems.

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

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

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology for a fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

But provided how quickly the tech is developing, I'm not sure how long I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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