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

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a couple of easy triggers about me supplied by my buddy Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of composing, but it's also a bit repeated, and really . It might have gone beyond Janet's triggers in looking at information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no 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 got in touch with the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, given that pivoting from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The firm utilizes its own AI tools to produce them, based on an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody developing one in anybody's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, produced by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

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

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

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound just like me.

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

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

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's masterpieces. 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 vocalists 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 actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for creative purposes need to be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without permission should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really effective however let's build it fairly and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese competitors using its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and damages America's swagger

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

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He points out 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 messing up the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a whole lot of happiness," says the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening 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 definitely positive we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them certify their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide data library including public data from a vast array of sources will likewise be offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 aimed to increase the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share information of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is said to want the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI firms, 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 companies broke the law when they took their material from the web without their approval, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore 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 analysis over how it collects training data and whether it ought to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to ponder, wiki.dulovic.tech Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It became one of the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a portion of the cost 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 profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually 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 larger jobs. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.

But offered how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain how long I can stay positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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