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

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

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a few basic triggers about me by my buddy Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.

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

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

There are lots of business online offering AI -book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, because 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 company utilizes its own AI tools to produce them, based on an open source big language model.

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 presently no barrier to anybody producing one in anyone's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, developed by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He wishes to widen his range, yogaasanas.science producing various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI -generated products to human customers.

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 produce, 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 similar material based upon it.

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

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

In 2023 a tune including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not consented to 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 believe using generative AI for innovative functions should be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without consent need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective however let's construct it morally and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese rivals using its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes market and damages America's swagger

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

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to utilize developers' material on the web to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

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 ruining the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a whole lot of pleasure," says the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening among its finest performing markets on the unclear guarantee of development."

A federal government representative stated: "No move will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them certify their content, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a nationwide information library containing public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules to manage 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 enhance the safety of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector required 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 said to want the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a number of claims versus AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their approval, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector forum.altaycoins.com is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training information and whether it should be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to contemplate, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the many downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

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

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has plenty of inaccuracies 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 remain positive that my considerably slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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