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

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

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

It's a fascinating 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 mimics my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in collecting data about me.

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

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

There are dozens of business online offering AI -book writing 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 sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, because pivoting from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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 anybody's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, created by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and happiness".

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

He intends to widen his range, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI-generated items to human consumers.

It's also a bit frightening if, library.kemu.ac.ke like me, you compose for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to produce, equipifieds.com and it does, definitely 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 churn out comparable content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are talking about data here, we in fact suggest human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard 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 find out how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a tune featuring AI -generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for imaginative purposes should be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without approval must be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective but let's develop it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some including the BBC - have actually picked to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have chosen to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to use creators' content on the web to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He mentions that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and messing up the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise highly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is weakening one of its best carrying out industries on the unclear pledge of development."

A federal government representative said: "No relocation will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a practical strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them license their content, access to top quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide data library consisting of public data from a vast array of sources will also be provided to AI scientists.

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 aimed to improve the safety of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

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

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

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training information and whether it must be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it established its technology for a fraction of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite hard to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

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

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