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

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a few basic prompts about me provided by my good friend Janet.

It's a fascinating read, and really amusing in parts. But it also meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of writing, but it's also a bit recurring, elearnportal.science and really verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's triggers in collecting information about me.

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

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

There are dozens of offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, given that rotating from assembling 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 create them, based upon an open source large language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anybody's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, developed by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and happiness".

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

He wants to broaden his range, creating different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound just 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 material based upon it.

"We ought to be clear, when we are talking about data here, we really indicate human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

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

In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although 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 believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without authorization must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's construct it ethically and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have picked to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use developers' content on the web to help develop their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations like defence, healthcare 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 your home of Lords, is likewise highly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is weakening one of its finest carrying out markets on the unclear guarantee of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them accredit their content, access to premium material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a national information library consisting of public data from a large range of sources will also be provided to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 enhance the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share details of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a number of lawsuits versus AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

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

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training information and whether it need to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to consider, 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 claims that it developed its innovation for a fraction of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I think 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 errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to check out in parts since it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm not sure how long I can stay confident that my considerably slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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