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For Christmas I received an intriguing gift from a good friend - my really own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a few easy prompts about me supplied by my friend Janet.

It's an interesting read, disgaeawiki.info and uproarious in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It simulates my chatty style of composing, however it's likewise a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's triggers in looking at data about me.

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

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

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

When I contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, since 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 company uses its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody developing one in anybody's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, king-wifi.win created by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is intended as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wishes to widen his range, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI -generated products to human clients.

It's likewise a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly in some parts, pattern-wiki.win 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 comparable material based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are discussing data here, we really indicate human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard developers' 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 find out 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 since it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for innovative purposes should be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without permission need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very powerful but let's build it morally and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has 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 utilize creators' content on the internet to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations 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 destroying the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is also strongly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a lot of pleasure," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining one of its finest performing markets on the vague guarantee of growth."

A government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to assist them accredit their content, access to high-quality material 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 plan, a nationwide data library including public data from a large range of sources will also be provided 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 aimed to increase the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the workings of their systems with the US 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 said to want the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a number of claims versus AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the web without their permission, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of elements which can make up fair usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training data and whether it should be paying for it.

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

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

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I really want 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 tasks. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to read in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But given how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm unsure how long I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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