For Christmas I received a fascinating present from a pal - my very own "very popular" book.

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

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

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

It imitates my chatty style of writing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and really verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's triggers in collecting data about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the kind 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 companies online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, considering 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 company uses its own AI tools to produce them, based upon an open source big language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody producing one in anybody's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He wants to widen his variety, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI-generated products to human customers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are discussing data here, we in fact mean human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. 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 singers 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 actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for imaginative functions ought to be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without authorization should be prohibited," Mr includes. "AI can be really powerful however let's build it fairly and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually chosen to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have decided 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 permit AI developers to use developers' material on the web to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

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

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is also highly versus removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is weakening among its best carrying out markets on the vague pledge of development."

A federal government representative said: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely positive we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them license their material, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

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

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share details of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a number of lawsuits versus AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the web without their authorization, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number 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 gathers training data and whether it need to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to ponder, 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 established its technology for a fraction of the cost of the similarity 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 believe that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It is full of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to read in parts since it's so verbose.

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

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