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For Christmas I got a fascinating gift from a buddy - my very own "very popular" book.

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

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

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

It simulates my chatty style of writing, however it's likewise a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no family 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 called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, since rotating from compiling 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 create them, based on an open source big language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone producing one in anyone's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and created "solely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He hopes to expand his range, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI-generated items to human clients.

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

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

"We should be clear, when we are talking about data here, we really imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard 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 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 developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for creative purposes should be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without consent must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective however let's develop it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.

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

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

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a lot of joy," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining one of its finest carrying out industries on the vague promise of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a useful plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them accredit their content, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide information library containing public information from a wide variety of sources will also be made available 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 to boost the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share information of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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 regulation.

This comes as a variety of suits versus AI companies, users.atw.hu and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everyone from the New york city 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 authorization, gratisafhalen.be and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of factors which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training data and whether it should be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it developed its innovation for a fraction of the rate of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly want 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 larger jobs. It is full of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.

But offered 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 editing abilities, are much better.

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