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For Christmas I got an interesting present from a good friend - my very own "very popular" book.

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

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

It's a fascinating read, yogaasanas.science and uproarious in parts. But it likewise quite a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit recurring, and very verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the type 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 companies online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, since rotating 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 utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone creating one in anyone's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is planned as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

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

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound simply like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then churn out comparable content based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are talking about data here, we in fact indicate human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to respect creators' 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 after that do more like that."

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

"I do not believe using generative AI for imaginative purposes need to be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without authorization need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective but let's build it fairly and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online content for wiki.snooze-hotelsoftware.de training purposes. Others have actually decided to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use developers' material on the internet to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

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

"All of these things work without going and changing 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 also highly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of happiness," says the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening among its best performing industries on the unclear pledge of development."

A government representative said: "No relocation will be made until we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them license their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a national information library consisting of public information from a large range of sources will likewise be provided to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 intended to enhance the security of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector required to share information of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has now been repealed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is said to want the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a number of claims against AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everyone 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 material from the web without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of factors which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training data and whether it need to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for a fraction of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and forum.batman.gainedge.org threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

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

But provided how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure how long I can remain positive that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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