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

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a couple of basic prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

It's an interesting read, and uproarious 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, however it's also a bit repeated, and really verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's triggers in looking at data about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on almost 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 president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, galgbtqhistoryproject.org primarily in the US, since rotating from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to generate them, based on an open source large language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in anyone's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, created by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is planned as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He intends to widen his range, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound simply like me.

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

"We need to be clear, when we are talking about data here, we really imply human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. 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 song including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists 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 actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think the usage of generative AI for imaginative purposes must be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without approval ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective but let's build it fairly and fairly."

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

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to use developers' material on the web to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in areas like defence, lespoetesbizarres.free.fr 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 destroying the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also highly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a whole 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 best performing industries on the vague promise of development."

A government representative said: "No relocation will be made until we are definitely positive we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a national information library including public information from a large range of sources will also be provided 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 aimed to increase the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI companies, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

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 companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of elements which can constitute fair use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training information and whether it ought to be spending for it.

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

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

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

But provided how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not sure for how long I can remain confident that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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