For Christmas I received an interesting gift 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 glowing reviews.

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a couple of basic prompts about me supplied by my pal Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and uproarious in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of composing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repeated hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

There are lots 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 sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, given that rotating from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to produce them, based upon an open source big language design.

I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - just Janet, who created it, can order any more copies.

There is presently no barrier to anyone creating one in anybody's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, created by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold even more.

He wants to broaden his range, generating different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI-generated products to human consumers.

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

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

"We need to be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we actually mean human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. 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 tune featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for imaginative purposes ought to be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without authorization need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really effective however let's build it fairly and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually chosen to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have actually chosen to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI developers to use creators' content on the internet to help establish their models, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations like defence, healthcare and ghetto-art-asso.com logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

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

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

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of joy," states the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining among its finest performing markets on the unclear guarantee of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made until we are definitely confident we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them license 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 government's new AI strategy, a national data library including public data from a wide range of sources will likewise be provided 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 increase the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share details of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

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 deal with less policy.

This comes as a number of lawsuits versus AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everyone 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 content from the internet without their consent, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can constitute reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it ought to 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 one of the most downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its innovation for a fraction of the rate of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I believe 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 weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But provided how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure the length of time I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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