For Christmas I received an interesting present from a friend - my really 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 basic prompts about me provided by my friend Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of composing, however it's also a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

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

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

There are dozens of companies online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, given that rotating from assembling 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 create them, based upon 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 order any additional copies.

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

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

He wants to broaden his variety, creating different genres such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI-generated products to human clients.

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

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

"We must be clear, when we are talking about information here, we actually imply human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short 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 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 not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe the use of generative AI for innovative purposes ought to be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without approval ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really powerful but let's build it fairly and fairly."

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

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

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

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is likewise strongly against removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is undermining one of its finest carrying out industries on the unclear promise of development."

A federal government representative said: "No move will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide data library including public data from a large range of sources will likewise be offered 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 improve the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been reversed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is said to want the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a number of suits against AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and oke.zone even a comedian.

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

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of elements which can make up fair usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training data and whether it should be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It became the many downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a portion of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing 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 have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for larger projects. It is full of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But given how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm not sure for how long I can remain positive that my substantially slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

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