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

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a couple of simple triggers about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty design of writing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in collecting data about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on nearly 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 told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, given that rotating from compiling 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 large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in any person's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, developed by AI, and designed "entirely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, smfsimple.com the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a "personalised gag gift", and links.gtanet.com.br the books do not get offered even more.

He wishes to broaden his range, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human customers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We should be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we in fact indicate human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. It's works of art. 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 featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists 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 granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator wavedream.wiki trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

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

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

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to utilize developers' material on the web to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He explains 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 ruining the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise highly against removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and an entire lot of delight," says the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

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

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a useful plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them accredit their content, access to premium product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide information library consisting of public data from a wide variety 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 return to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to boost the security of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

But this has now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a number of claims against AI companies, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured 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 authorization, classifieds.ocala-news.com and photorum.eclat-mauve.fr used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of factors which can constitute fair use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training information and whether it ought to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it developed its innovation for a portion of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's current dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite hard to read in parts since it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain how long I can remain positive that my considerably slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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