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

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a couple of basic prompts about me provided by my buddy Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty design of writing, but it's also a bit repeated, and very verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts 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 mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

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

When I contacted the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, given that pivoting from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The company 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 developed it, can order any more copies.

There is currently no barrier to anybody developing one in anybody's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, produced by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He wishes to broaden his range, producing different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human clients.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because 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 used to train generative AI tools that then churn out comparable material based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are discussing information here, we really suggest human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

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

In 2023 a tune featuring AI -generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, hikvisiondb.webcam it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for innovative functions need to be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without consent should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really powerful but let's develop it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have selected to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for surgiteams.com example.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to utilize developers' content on the web to assist develop their models, unless the rights holders decide 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, journalists and artists.

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

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

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

"The government is undermining one of its finest carrying out markets on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A government representative said: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to help them certify their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a nationwide information library including public data from a wide range of sources will also be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules to control AI is now up in the air following President Trump's go back to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to increase the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is stated to want the AI sector to deal with less regulation.

This comes as a variety of claims against AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everybody 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 internet without their permission, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of factors which can make up fair use - 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 paying for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it developed its innovation for a portion of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly 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 jobs. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite hard to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure how long I can remain positive that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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