For Christmas I received an interesting gift from a pal - my really own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a few simple prompts about me provided by my buddy Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of composing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, 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 business online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, primarily 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 on an open source large language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in anybody's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, created by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

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

He wishes to widen his range, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI-generated items to human clients.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, certainly 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 churn out similar material based upon it.

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

"This is books, this is articles, 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 tune featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for creative functions ought to be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without approval ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "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 selected to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use developers' material on the web to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations 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 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 getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

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

A federal government representative stated: "No move will be made up until we are absolutely positive we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to assist them certify their content, access to high-quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

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

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 boost the safety of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector required to share details of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has actually now been by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a number of suits against AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everybody from the New york city 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 consent, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can make up reasonable use - 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 adequate to contemplate, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It became one of the most downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it established 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 existing supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It is full of mistakes and oke.zone hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But provided how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not sure the length of time I can remain positive that my substantially slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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