For Christmas I got a fascinating gift from a good friend - my very own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a few basic prompts about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

It's an interesting read, and uproarious in parts. But it likewise 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, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repetitive hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

There are lots 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 informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, considering that pivoting from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to generate them, based upon 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 order any more copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone producing one in any person's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, created by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and joy".

Legally, parentingliteracy.com the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is meant as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He wishes to broaden his range, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound simply like me.

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

"We need to be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we actually suggest human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. 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 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 not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for imaginative functions ought to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without authorization need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective but let's build it ethically and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have chosen to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

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 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 likewise strongly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is weakening among its finest performing industries on the vague promise of development."

A federal government representative said: "No relocation will be made till we are definitely confident we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to assist them license their material, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a national data library including public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise be offered 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 enhance the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is said to desire the AI sector to deal with less policy.

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

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

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and asteroidsathome.net are therefore exempt. There are a variety of factors which can constitute reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it ought to be spending for it.

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

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

As for me and a profession as an author, I think 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 present weak point in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to check out in parts since it's so verbose.

But offered how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm not sure the length of time I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are much better.

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