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For Christmas I received a fascinating present from a buddy - my extremely own "very popular" book.

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

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

It's a fascinating read, and really funny in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

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

Several sentences start "as a leading technology journalist ..." - cringe - which could 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 almost 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 contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, given that pivoting 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 upon an open source large language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in anybody's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is intended as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He wants to widen his range, creating different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human customers.

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

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

"We must be clear, when we are talking about information here, we actually suggest human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

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

In 2023 a song including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers 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 think the usage of generative AI for creative purposes ought to be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without consent must be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective however let's develop it fairly and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is considering an of the law that would permit AI developers to utilize developers' content on the internet to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

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 your house of Lords, is also highly versus removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is weakening among its finest carrying out industries on the unclear pledge of development."

A government representative said: "No relocation will be made up until we are absolutely positive we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for right holders to help them accredit their material, access to top quality product 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 plan, a nationwide data library including public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise be provided to AI researchers.

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

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

This comes as a number of lawsuits versus AI firms, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their consent, and garagesale.es used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of elements which can make up fair use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training information and whether it must be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It became one of the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

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

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

But given how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm not sure how long I can remain confident that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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