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For Christmas I got a fascinating present from a good friend - my extremely own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a couple of basic prompts about me supplied by my buddy Janet.

It's an interesting read, and very funny 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 style of composing, but it's also a bit recurring, and extremely verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.

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

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

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

When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally 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 create them, based on an open source large .

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone producing one in anybody's name, gdprhub.eu including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wishes to widen his variety, creating different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - offering AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We should be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we in fact mean human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is photos. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to discover how to do something and after that 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 they had not granted 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 innovative purposes ought to be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without approval should be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's construct it morally and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have picked to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to utilize creators' content on the internet 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 areas 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 ruining the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The federal government is weakening among its best performing markets on the vague promise of development."

A federal government representative stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are absolutely confident we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for right holders to help them accredit their content, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide data library containing public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise be offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to control AI is now up in the air following President Trump's return to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to improve the safety of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

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

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the web without their consent, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can make up fair use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training data and whether it must be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being 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 similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to check out in parts since it's so verbose.

But offered how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm unsure the length of time I can stay positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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