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

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

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

It's an intriguing read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It simulates my chatty design of writing, however it's likewise a bit repeated, and really verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's triggers in looking at 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 strange, repeated hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

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

When I got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, given 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 generate them, based on an open source large language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in anybody's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is planned as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He intends to expand his range, various categories such as sci-fi, and engel-und-waisen.de maybe using an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

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

"We must be clear, when we are discussing information here, we actually mean human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, systemcheck-wiki.de which projects for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to learn how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a tune including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think the usage of generative AI for creative functions must be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without authorization ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really powerful however let's develop it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have chosen to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to use developers' material on the internet to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care 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 nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is also strongly versus getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 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 government is undermining one of its finest performing markets on the unclear guarantee of development."

A government representative stated: "No move will be made till we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to help them certify their material, access to premium material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a nationwide information library containing public data from a large range of sources will also be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 boost the security of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

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

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everybody from the New york city 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 web without their approval, and utilized it to train their systems.

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

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

DeepSeek declares 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 existing dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It is complete of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to check out in parts since it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure for how long I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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