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

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a few basic triggers about me provided by my friend Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit recurring, and extremely verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

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

There are lots of business 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 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 utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based upon an open source large language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in anybody's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and created "solely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is planned as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get offered further.

He intends to widen his variety, creating different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI-generated items to human customers.

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

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable content based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we really suggest human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is images. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to learn how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a tune including AI -generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, oke.zone it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for imaginative purposes should be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without authorization ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's build it fairly and fairly."

OpenAI says 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 material for training purposes. Others have actually decided to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use creators' material on the web to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

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

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

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is likewise strongly against removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is undermining one of its best carrying out markets on the vague guarantee of development."

A government representative stated: "No move will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to assist them certify their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide information library containing public information from a large range of sources will likewise be offered 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 aimed to boost the safety of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector required to share details of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their approval, 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 aspects which can make up fair use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it should be spending for it.

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

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

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I really 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 larger projects. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But offered how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure for how long I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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