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

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a few basic triggers 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 somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of writing, however it's also a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in looking at information about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

There are lots of companies online offering AI -book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, because pivoting 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 generate them, based upon an open source big language model.

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

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

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is intended as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wants to expand his range, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - offering AI -generated products to human customers.

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

Musicians, authors, artists and kenpoguy.com actors worldwide have actually expressed alarm about their work being utilized to AI tools that then produce comparable material based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we really mean human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, 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 after that do more like that."

In 2023 a tune including 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 not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for imaginative functions need to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without permission must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very powerful however let's construct it ethically and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have selected to block AI designers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for akropolistravel.com instance.

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

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 ruining the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also highly against removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and an entire lot of joy," states the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining among its finest carrying out industries on the unclear guarantee of development."

A government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them license their content, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a nationwide information library consisting of public information from a vast array of sources will likewise be offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 increase the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share information of the functions 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 rather, however he is stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a variety of suits versus AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out 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 internet without their approval, 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 reasonable 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 need to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all enough to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It became the many downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

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

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I truly want 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 tasks. It is complete of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

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

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