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For Christmas I received an intriguing gift from a buddy - my extremely own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a few basic prompts about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty design of composing, however it's likewise a bit recurring, and really verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in collating 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 mysterious, repeated hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically 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 called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, considering that rotating from compiling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The firm uses 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 - only Janet, who created it, can buy any further copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in anyone's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, produced by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered even more.

He intends to widen his variety, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated items to human customers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are discussing data here, we actually indicate human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard 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 discover how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song featuring AI -generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms since 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 phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for imaginative purposes must be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without consent should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very powerful however let's develop it morally and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to utilize creators' material on the internet to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He mentions 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 changing copyright law and destroying the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also highly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is weakening one of its finest carrying out markets on the unclear pledge of growth."

A government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a national data library including public information 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 aimed to improve the safety of AI with, among other things, parentingliteracy.com firms in the sector required to share details of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

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

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the web without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

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

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

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a portion of the rate of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

But offered how quickly the tech is developing, I'm uncertain how long I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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