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

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a couple of simple prompts about me provided by my good friend Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty design of writing, but it's likewise a bit repeated, and really verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in looking at information about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no animals). 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 president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, given that pivoting from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The firm uses its own AI tools to generate 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 developed it, can purchase any more copies.

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, developed by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He wants to expand his variety, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated items to human customers.

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

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have actually revealed 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 speaking about data 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 posts, this is images. It's works of art. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to discover how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a tune including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media 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 attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think the usage of generative AI for imaginative functions need to be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without consent need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very powerful however let's develop it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have decided to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to use developers' content on the web to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He explains that AI can make advances in areas 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 messing up the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of joy," states the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening one of its best carrying out industries on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for right holders to assist them certify their content, access to premium material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide information library consisting of public data from a large range of sources will likewise be provided to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 aimed to improve the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI firms, forum.pinoo.com.tr and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI companies broke 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 for that reason exempt. There are a variety of elements which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and whether it need to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all enough to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims 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.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It is full of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts since it's so verbose.

But given how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure the length of time I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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