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For Christmas I received an interesting 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 radiant reviews.

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a few easy triggers about me supplied by my pal Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

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

There are dozens of business online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, because rotating from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in anybody's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and wolvesbaneuo.com designed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is planned as a "customised gag present", garagesale.es and the books do not get offered further.

He wishes to widen his range, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human clients.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to produce, suvenir51.ru and it does, certainly 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 churn out similar material based upon it.

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

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The whole 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 not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for imaginative purposes ought to be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without approval should be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful but let's build it morally and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese competitors utilizing 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 - including the BBC - have actually selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have chosen to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to utilize developers' content on the web to assist develop their models, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex explains 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 altering copyright law and destroying the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also highly against eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and an entire lot of delight," says the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining one of its best performing industries on the vague guarantee of growth."

A federal government representative said: "No move will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a practical strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to help them accredit their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide data library including public data 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 increase the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal 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 desire the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a number of suits versus AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They claim that the AI the law when they took their content from the web without their consent, 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 constitute fair use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training data and whether it need to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It became the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

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

When it comes to me and a career 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 projects. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But offered how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not exactly sure for how long I can stay positive that my significantly slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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