For Christmas I received an intriguing gift from a friend - my very 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 entirely composed by AI, with a few easy prompts about me supplied by my good friend 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 imitates my chatty design of composing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and really verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collecting data about me.

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

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

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

When I got in touch with the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, since pivoting from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to create them, based upon an open source large language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in anyone's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is planned as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He wants to widen his range, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably took less than a minute to create, addsub.wiki and it does, surgiteams.com definitely in some parts, sound much like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have revealed 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 speaking about information here, we actually mean human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies 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 find out how to do something and after that 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 due to the fact that it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe the use of generative AI for innovative purposes ought to be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without consent must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's build it morally and fairly."

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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 decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to utilize developers' material on the internet to help establish their models, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He explains that AI can make advances in locations like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and destroying the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also strongly versus removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is weakening one of its finest carrying out markets on the unclear promise of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made until we are definitely positive we have a useful strategy that delivers 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 openness for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide information library consisting of public data from a broad range of sources will likewise be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules to manage 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 enhance 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 released.

But this has now been reversed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is said to desire the AI sector to face less guideline.

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

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

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

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

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology for a fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It is complete of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

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

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