For Christmas I received an interesting present from a buddy - 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 reviews.

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a few basic prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in collecting data about me.

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

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

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

When I got in touch with the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, because rotating from assembling 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 on an open source large language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody producing one in anyone's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, produced by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

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

He wishes to widen his variety, generating various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to generate, forum.pinoo.com.tr and higgledy-piggledy.xyz it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being used 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 really imply human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, 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 then do more like that."

In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists 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 not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

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

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually selected to block 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 government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use creators' material on the web to help establish their models, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

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

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and ruining the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also strongly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.

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

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

A government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made till we are definitely confident we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to assist them accredit their material, 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 federal government's brand-new AI plan, a national data library containing public information from a wide variety of sources will also be offered to AI scientists.

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 increase the security of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less policy.

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

They claim that the AI the law when they took their content from the web without their permission, 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 elements which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training data and whether it should 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 the many downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it developed its innovation for a portion of the price of the similarity 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 career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.

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

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