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

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

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

It's an intriguing read, e.bike.free.fr and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders rather a lot, and is someplace in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's also a strange, repetitive hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no family 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 got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, considering that pivoting 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 produce them, based upon 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 buy any further copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anybody's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, developed by AI, bytes-the-dust.com and developed "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is meant as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He wants to widen his variety, creating different genres such as sci-fi, and wiki.myamens.com perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI -generated products to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

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

"We should be clear, when we are discussing data here, we in fact mean human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is images. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to find out how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a tune including 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 not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for creative functions should be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without permission ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective but let's construct it fairly and relatively."

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

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to use developers' content on the internet to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations 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 destroying the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise highly against 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 a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining among its best carrying out markets on the vague pledge of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them accredit their content, access to premium material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a national information library containing public data from a broad variety of sources will likewise be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 enhance the safety of AI with, amongst other things, companies 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 repealed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a number of lawsuits versus AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their authorization, and sitiosecuador.com used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are for archmageriseswiki.com that reason exempt. There are a number of elements which can constitute reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training data and whether it must be paying for it.

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

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

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually 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 jobs. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

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

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