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

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a few easy prompts about me provided by my friend Janet.

It's a fascinating 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 design of composing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly 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 told me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, considering that pivoting from putting together AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The firm uses its own AI tools to create them, based upon an open source large language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody developing one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, produced by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He intends to expand his variety, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer 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 most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We need to be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we in fact imply human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

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

In 2023 a song including AI -generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for imaginative functions ought to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without approval should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely powerful but let's build it ethically and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have picked to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have actually decided to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to utilize developers' material on the web to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He mentions 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 destroying the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a lot of pleasure," states the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

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

A government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made until we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them accredit their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, 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 intended to improve the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector orcz.com required to share details of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of claims against AI firms, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten 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 content from the internet without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

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

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

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

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It is complete of inaccuracies and hallucinations, disgaeawiki.info and it can be rather challenging to read in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is developing, I'm uncertain the length of time I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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