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

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a few basic triggers about me provided by my friend Janet.

It's a fascinating read, and extremely amusing in parts. But it also meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of composing, however it's likewise a bit recurring, and extremely verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's triggers in collecting information 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 type of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on nearly 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 chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally 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 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 - only Janet, who produced it, can order any additional copies.

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

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He wants to broaden his range, producing different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound simply like me.

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we in fact indicate human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is photos. It's works of art. 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 song 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 choose it for a Grammy award. And wiki.snooze-hotelsoftware.de even though the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for innovative purposes need to be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without consent must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful but let's develop it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have 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 considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use creators' material on the web to help develop their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations 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 ruining the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is likewise highly against eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of delight," states the Baroness, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening among its best carrying out markets on the unclear guarantee of development."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made till we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them certify their content, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a nationwide information library including public information from a large range of sources will likewise be offered to AI scientists.

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 security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share details of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been repealed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is said to want the AI sector to deal with less regulation.

This comes as a variety of suits against AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everyone from the New York 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 web without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of factors which can make up fair usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training data and whether it need to be paying for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it developed its innovation for a fraction of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy 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 have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to read in parts because it's so verbose.

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

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