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

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

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a few basic prompts about me provided by my buddy Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty style of composing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repetitive 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 dozens of companies online offering AI -book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the primary executive Adir Mashiach, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, given 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 company uses its own AI tools to produce them, based on an open source big language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in anyone's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and created "solely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is intended as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered further.

He wishes to broaden his range, creating different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - offering AI -generated items to human clients.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it probably 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 expressed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce similar material based upon it.

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

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

In 2023 a song featuring 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 actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for imaginative purposes ought to be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without approval ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective but let's construct it ethically and fairly."

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

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He explains that AI can make advances in locations 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 messing up the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a whole lot of delight," says 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 industries on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made till we are definitely positive we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them accredit their content, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a national data library containing public data from a large range of sources will likewise be made readily available to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to manage 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 security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has actually now been reversed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is stated to want the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their permission, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of factors which can constitute fair use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training information and whether it should be paying for it.

If this wasn't all enough to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

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

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe 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 existing weakness in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

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

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