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

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

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

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

It imitates my chatty style of composing, but it's also a bit repeated, and really verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no 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 contacted the president Adir Mashiach, wiki.dulovic.tech based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, because 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 uses its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source big language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in anybody's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, developed by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, clashofcryptos.trade but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wants to broaden his variety, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI-generated products to human clients.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you 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 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 content based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we in fact suggest human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, systemcheck-wiki.de founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is pictures. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to discover how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a song including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for innovative purposes should be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without consent should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful however let's build it fairly and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese competitors utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and damages America's swagger

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 chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to utilize creators' content on the web to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He points out 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 altering copyright law and ruining the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is likewise highly versus removing copyright law for AI.

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

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

A government representative stated: "No relocation will be made till we are definitely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them license their material, access to top quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a nationwide information library containing public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise be made readily available to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 intended to improve the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is stated to want the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare 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 "fair use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of aspects which can make up fair usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training data and whether it must be paying for it.

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

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

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to read in parts because it's so verbose.

But offered how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure for how long I can stay confident that my significantly slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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