For Christmas I received a fascinating gift from a buddy - my very 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 couple of basic prompts about me provided by my buddy Janet.

It's an intriguing read, visualchemy.gallery and very funny in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and kenpoguy.com is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of composing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and bphomesteading.com extremely verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's triggers in looking at information about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repeated hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on almost 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 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 pivoting from compiling 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 produce them, based on an open source large language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in any person's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, produced by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and joy".

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

He intends to widen his variety, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI-generated items to human clients.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to 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 must be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we actually mean human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. It's works of art. 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 including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and trademarketclassifieds.com 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 attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for innovative purposes should be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without consent ought 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 - including the BBC - have selected to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually decided to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to use creators' material on the internet to help develop their models, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He explains 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 ruining the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of pleasure," says the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening one of its best carrying out industries on the unclear pledge of development."

A government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them accredit their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a nationwide data library including public data from a large variety 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 aimed to boost the security of AI with, scientific-programs.science amongst other things, firms 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 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 deal with less policy.

This comes as a number of lawsuits against AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

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

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of factors 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 information and whether it ought to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector rocksoff.org over the past week. It became the many downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its innovation for a fraction of the rate of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly desire 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 tasks. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to read in parts since it's so verbose.

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

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