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

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

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a few simple prompts about me provided by my good friend Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty design of composing, but it's likewise a bit repeated, and really verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

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

When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, since pivoting from compiling 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 generate them, based upon an open source big language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody producing one in anybody's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, produced by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He hopes to widen his variety, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human customers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

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

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. It's works of art. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to learn how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for creative functions should be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without authorization need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely powerful but let's build it fairly and fairly."

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

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to use developers' content on the internet to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He mentions 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 messing up the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise highly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is undermining among its best carrying out industries on the unclear pledge of development."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them license their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's AI strategy, a national information library containing public data from a large range of sources will also be offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 intended to boost the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

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

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the web without their authorization, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of elements which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training data and whether it must be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a fraction of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues 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 want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure how long I can stay positive that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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