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For Christmas I received an intriguing gift from a friend - my really own "very popular" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent title) bears my name and my image on its cover, and it has glowing reviews.

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

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

It imitates my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit recurring, and really verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's triggers in collating information about me.

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

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

There are lots of business online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, since pivoting from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in any person's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, created by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is meant as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wishes to widen his range, creating different genres such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human clients.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound just like me.

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are discussing information here, we in fact mean human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's works of art. 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 tune including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for imaginative functions ought to be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without permission need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very powerful but let's develop it fairly and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually picked to block AI designers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to utilize developers' material on the web to assist develop their models, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He points out 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 altering copyright law and messing up the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a lot of pleasure," states the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening among its best performing industries on the vague promise of growth."

A federal government representative stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are absolutely positive we have a practical strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them license their content, access to top quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide information library consisting of public information 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, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is said to desire the AI sector to face less policy.

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

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their authorization, and utilized 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 aspects which can constitute fair use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and whether it must be spending for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to contemplate, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It became one of the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for a portion of the rate of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually 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 desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It is full of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But offered how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm unsure how long I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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