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For Christmas I got an interesting present from a good friend - my extremely 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 entirely written by AI, with a couple of basic prompts about me supplied by my friend Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty style of writing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and very verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in looking at information about me.

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

There's likewise a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

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

When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, since rotating from putting together AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The firm uses its own AI tools to generate them, based on an open source big language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone producing one in anybody's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, created by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He wishes to widen his range, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI -generated products to human clients.

It's likewise a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to create, and grandtribunal.org it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

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

"We should be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we actually mean human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is photos. It's works of art. 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 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 photorum.eclat-mauve.fr they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for imaginative functions should be prohibited, however 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 includes. "AI can be very powerful but let's build it ethically and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually picked to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have chosen to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI developers to utilize developers' content on the web to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He explains 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 ruining the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a whole lot of joy," says the Baroness, bbarlock.com who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening one of its best carrying out industries on the unclear promise of growth."

A government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them license their content, access to top quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a national information library containing public information from a vast array of sources will also be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal rules to manage 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 security of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector required to share information of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has actually now been rescinded by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is said to desire the AI sector to face less guideline.

This comes as a number of suits against AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everyone 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 material from the internet without their consent, 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 constitute reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training information and whether it need to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all enough to consider, 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 established its technology for a fraction of the rate of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure for how long I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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