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For Christmas I got a fascinating present from a good friend - my very own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a couple of simple triggers about me provided by my friend Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and really amusing in parts. But it also meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere between a self-help book and larsaluarna.se a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of composing, but it's also a bit recurring, and really verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

There's likewise a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

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

When I contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, because rotating from compiling 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 generate them, based on an open source big language design.

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

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

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wishes to widen his variety, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human consumers.

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

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have actually expressed 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 actually mean human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is images. It's artworks. It's records ... The whole 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 singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that it was not their work and they had 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 phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for imaginative purposes need to be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without approval must be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective but let's develop it morally and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have selected to block AI designers from their online material for training purposes. Others have decided to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to utilize creators' material on the web to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He mentions 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 changing copyright law and destroying the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also strongly against removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is undermining among its finest carrying out markets on the vague guarantee of development."

A federal government representative said: "No relocation will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them license their material, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide data library including public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise be made readily available to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to manage 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 boost the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share details of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has actually now been rescinded by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is said to want the AI sector to face less guideline.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually 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 "reasonable usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of factors which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training information and whether it should be paying for it.

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

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

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It is complete of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to read in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But provided how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm not sure the length of time I can stay positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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