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

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

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a few easy prompts about me provided by my pal 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 style of writing, however it's likewise a bit recurring, and very . It might have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collating data about me.

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

There's also a strange, repeated hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly 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 called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, given that rotating from compiling 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 large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and created "solely to bring humour and joy".

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

He hopes to widen his range, generating various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI -generated products to human consumers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

Musicians, imoodle.win authors, artists and actors worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar content based upon it.

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

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

In 2023 a song including 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 trying 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 using generative AI for innovative purposes should be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without approval must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful however let's construct it morally and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese rivals using its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes market and dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually picked to block AI developers from trawling their online content for trade-britanica.trade training functions. Others have decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to use creators' content on the web to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He points out that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.

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

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

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

"The government is weakening among its finest performing markets on the unclear promise of growth."

A government representative said: "No relocation will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a useful plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to assist them license their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide data library including public data from a large range of sources will likewise be made readily available to AI scientists.

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 aimed to increase the safety of AI with, kenpoguy.com to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been reversed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less policy.

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

They declare that the AI firms 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 "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training information and whether it must be spending for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded totally 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 actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It is full of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

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 editing abilities, are much better.

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