For Christmas I got an intriguing present from a buddy - my very own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was entirely written by AI, oke.zone with a couple of basic triggers about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's triggers in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the kind of my cat (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 called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, because rotating from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The firm utilizes its own AI tools to generate them, based on an open source big language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone producing one in anyone's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wishes to expand his variety, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human customers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to produce, 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 similar content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are discussing data here, we really suggest human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. 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 tune featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for innovative functions need to be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without authorization should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective however let's construct it ethically and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have picked to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have actually decided to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

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 destroying the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a lot of delight," 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 vague promise of development."

A government spokesperson said: "No move will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them accredit their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a nationwide data library including public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise be offered 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 improve the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share details of the workings of their systems with the US 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 desire the AI sector to deal with less policy.

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

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the web without their approval, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" 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 examination over how it collects training data and whether it ought to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to contemplate, Chinese AI firm 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 fraction of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, addsub.wiki I believe that at the minute, if I actually want 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 bigger tasks. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But given how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm unsure the length of time I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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