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

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

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

It's an intriguing read, and very funny in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is somewhere between a self-help book and addsub.wiki a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of writing, however it's likewise a bit recurring, and extremely verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's triggers in collating data about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repeated hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no family 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 called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, given that rotating 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 on an open source large language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody developing one in anybody's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, created by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and delight".

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

He hopes to expand his range, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI -generated goods to human customers.

It's likewise a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar material based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we in fact imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's artworks. 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 tune featuring 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 consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for creative functions must be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without permission must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really powerful but let's build it morally and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese competitors utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and damages America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have picked to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually chosen 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 enable AI designers to use creators' material on the web to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He explains 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 messing up the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The government is undermining among its finest carrying out industries on the vague pledge of growth."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a practical plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them certify their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide data library containing public information from a vast array of sources will likewise be offered to AI scientists.

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 aimed to enhance the security of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the functions 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, but he is stated to want the AI sector to deal with less policy.

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

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the web without their approval, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their fall under "reasonable use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of factors which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training information and whether it ought to be paying for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it established its technology for a fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance 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 need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It is complete of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts because it's so verbose.

But given how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure the length of time I can remain positive that my considerably slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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