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

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

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

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

It mimics my chatty design of writing, however it's likewise a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's triggers in looking at information about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repetitive hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens 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 actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, since rotating 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 big language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody producing one in anyone's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is planned as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He wishes to widen his variety, generating different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - offering AI -generated items 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 produce, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We ought 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 campaigns for AI firms to regard creators' rights.

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

In 2023 a song featuring AI -generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks 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 creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for imaginative functions ought to be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without authorization need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really effective but let's build it ethically and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually picked to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He points out that AI can make advances in areas 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 messing up the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The federal government is weakening one of its finest performing markets on the vague guarantee of growth."

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

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide data library consisting of public information from a vast array of sources will also be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules to control 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 enhance the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI companies, and archmageriseswiki.com particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their permission, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and whether it must be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it established its innovation for a fraction of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I really 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 errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite hard to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.

But offered how quickly the tech is developing, I'm not exactly sure how long I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

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