For Christmas I received a fascinating gift from a good friend - my very own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a couple of simple triggers about me provided by my friend Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of writing, however it's also a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collecting information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the type 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 writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered around 150,000 customised 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 company uses its own AI tools to produce them, based upon an open source large language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

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

He wishes to expand his variety, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely 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 comparable material based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are talking about data here, we really imply human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

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

In 2023 a song including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists 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 consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for creative purposes need to be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without permission should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's construct it morally and relatively."

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

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to utilize creators' 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, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.

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

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

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

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

A government representative stated: "No relocation will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to assist them license their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI developers."

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

In the US the future of federal guidelines to manage AI is now up in the air following President Trump's go back to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to boost the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share information of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has actually now been rescinded by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less guideline.

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

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their consent, and utilized it to train their systems.

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

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

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

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But provided how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not exactly sure the length of time I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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