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

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

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

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

It simulates my chatty style of composing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor 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 called the president Adir Mashiach, forum.altaycoins.com based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, since pivoting from compiling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - just Janet, who created it, can order any more copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and pleasure".

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

He wants to broaden his range, creating different categories such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - offering AI -generated products to human consumers.

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

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

"We should be clear, when we are discussing information here, we actually suggest human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. It's works of art. 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 including AI -generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks 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 attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for innovative functions should be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without authorization ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective however let's construct it morally and relatively."

OpenAI says Chinese rivals using its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

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

In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually selected to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually chosen to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to use developers' material on the internet to assist establish their designs, oke.zone unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

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

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

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of happiness," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining one of its finest performing industries on the vague guarantee of development."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made till we are definitely positive we have a useful plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to assist them license their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a national information library containing public information from a broad variety of sources will likewise be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 boost the safety of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US federal 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 want the AI sector to deal with less regulation.

This comes as a variety of suits versus AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out 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 internet without their permission, and utilized 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 elements which can make up fair use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. 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 sufficient to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It became the a lot of downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it established its technology for a portion of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts since it's so verbose.

But given how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm not sure for how long I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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