For Christmas I received an interesting gift from a 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 glowing evaluations.

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a couple of easy triggers about me provided by my pal Janet.

It's an interesting read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is somewhere 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 very verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's triggers in looking at information about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (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 writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, since rotating 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 create them, based upon an open source big language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He wants to widen his range, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound just like me.

Musicians, authors, oke.zone artists and actors worldwide have actually expressed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are talking about data here, we really imply human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. 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 including 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 actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate 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 ought to be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without consent should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely powerful but let's develop it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually picked to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually chosen to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

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

Ed Newton Rex explains 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, journalists and artists.

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and destroying the incomes of the nation'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 industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of joy," says the Baroness, forum.batman.gainedge.org who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining among its best performing markets on the unclear pledge of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made up until we are absolutely positive we have a useful strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to assist them accredit their content, access to premium material 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 national data library containing public information from a large range of sources will also 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 intended to enhance the safety of AI with, among other things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is said to want the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a variety of suits versus AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, oke.zone and even a comedian.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their authorization, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of aspects which can make up - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training information and whether it ought to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being the many downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its innovation for a fraction of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite hard to read in parts since it's so verbose.

But provided how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain how long I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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