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

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

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

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

It mimics my chatty design of composing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's triggers in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of companies online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, annunciogratis.net mainly in the US, since rotating from putting together 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 upon an open source large language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone creating one in anyone's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He hopes to expand his range, generating different categories such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - selling AI -generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound just like me.

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

"We should be clear, when we are discussing information here, we actually suggest human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is images. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a tune including AI -generated voices of Canadian vocalists 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 trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

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

OpenAI says Chinese competitors using its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

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

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have picked to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have actually 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' content on the internet to help 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, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

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

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise highly versus removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and an entire lot of delight," states the Baroness, oke.zone who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening one of its best carrying out industries on the vague guarantee of development."

A government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are absolutely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them license their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide data library including public information from a vast array of sources will likewise be offered 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 aimed to increase the security of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a variety of suits against AI companies, and especially against 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 companies broke the law when they took their content from the internet 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 number of aspects which can make up fair 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 need to be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it established its technology for a portion of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It is complete of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm uncertain for how long I can remain confident that my considerably slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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