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For Christmas I got an interesting present from a good 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 glowing reviews.

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a few simple prompts about me supplied by my friend Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty style of writing, niaskywalk.com however it's also a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on almost 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 primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, considering that pivoting from compiling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The firm utilizes its own AI tools to produce them, based upon an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, developed by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and joy".

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

He wants to expand his variety, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated items to human consumers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to create, and pipewiki.org it does, certainly in some parts, sound much 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 similar content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are discussing data here, we in fact suggest human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to find out 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 granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And utahsyardsale.com even though the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for creative purposes need to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without consent should be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's build it morally and relatively."

OpenAI says Chinese rivals using its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

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

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have chosen to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have decided to team up - 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 developers to utilize developers' material on the internet to help establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He mentions 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 messing up the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of happiness," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

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

A government representative stated: "No move will be made up until we are absolutely positive we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to assist them accredit their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, bybio.co a nationwide data library containing public information from a large range of sources will also be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 security of AI with, among other things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of claims against AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everybody from the New York Times to authors, bytes-the-dust.com music labels, and even a comedian.

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

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of aspects which can constitute fair use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and whether it need to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being the a lot of downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

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

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It is full of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

But given how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm uncertain the length of time I can remain positive that my considerably slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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