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

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me provided by my friend Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty design of writing, but it's also a bit recurring, and really verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating 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, repetitive hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no pets). And there's a on nearly every page - some more random than others.

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

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally 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 costs ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source big language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He hopes to widen his variety, generating different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound much like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have actually expressed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out comparable material based upon it.

"We ought to be clear, when we are talking about information here, we actually imply human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

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

In 2023 a song featuring 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 granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And thatswhathappened.wiki although the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for creative purposes need to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without consent need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective however let's construct it fairly and fairly."

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

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

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

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and destroying the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is also strongly 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 also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening among its best performing markets on the unclear promise of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a nationwide information library containing public data from a wide variety of sources will likewise be offered 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 intended to boost the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share information 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 remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is said to desire the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a variety of suits against AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everybody from the New York 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 web without their approval, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training data and whether it need to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually 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 developed its innovation for a fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But given how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure how long I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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