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

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty design of composing, however it's also a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my cat (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 got in touch with the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, considering that 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 utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based upon an open source big language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in anybody's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is planned as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get sold even more.

He wants to broaden his variety, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human clients.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to 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 comparable content based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are talking about data here, we really suggest human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is pictures. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out 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 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 the use of generative AI for imaginative functions ought to be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without approval must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really effective however let's build it morally and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually picked to block AI from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually decided to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

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

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

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

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of joy," says the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for archmageriseswiki.com Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

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

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made till we are absolutely positive we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them license their content, access to high-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 national data library consisting of public information from a large range of sources will likewise be provided to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 boost the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share details of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been rescinded by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is stated to want the AI sector to deal with less policy.

This comes as a number of suits against AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their permission, and utilized it to train their systems.

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

If this wasn't all adequate to consider, sitiosecuador.com Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology for a fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It is complete of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

But provided how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure the length of time I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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