For Christmas I got a fascinating gift from a good friend - my extremely own “very popular” book.

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

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

It’s an interesting read, and uproarious in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, and is someplace in between a and a stream of anecdotes.

It imitates my chatty design of writing, however it’s likewise a bit repeated, and really verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet’s prompts in looking at data about me.

Several sentences begin “as a leading technology journalist …” - cringe - which might have been scraped from an online bio.

There’s also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the kind 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 called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, since 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 utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source big language model.

I’m not asking you to buy my book. Actually you can’t - only Janet, who developed it, can order any further copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anyone’s name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and developed “exclusively to bring humour and pleasure”.

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a “personalised gag gift”, and the books do not get sold further.

He wants to broaden his variety, creating different genres such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It’s created to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - selling AI-generated items to human customers.

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 produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound just like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce similar content based upon it.

“We need to be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we in fact mean human developers’ life works,” states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard creators’ rights.

“This is books, this is posts, this is images. It’s works of art. It’s records … The entire point of AI training is to discover 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 networks before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn’t stop the track’s creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

“I do not think the usage of generative AI for imaginative functions must be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals’s work without authorization ought to be prohibited,” Mr Newton Rex adds. “AI can be extremely powerful but let’s construct it morally and relatively.”

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have chosen to block AI designers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have decided to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to utilize creators’ content on the web to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as “insanity”.

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters 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, mediawiki.hcah.in a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also strongly versus removing copyright law for AI.

“Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and an entire lot of joy,” 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 performing industries on the unclear promise of development.”

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

Under the UK federal government’s new AI plan, a national information library including public information from a wide variety of sources will also be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is stated to want the AI sector to deal with less regulation.

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI companies, wiki.vifm.info and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their authorization, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under “reasonable use” and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of factors which can constitute reasonable use - it’s not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training data and whether it ought to be spending for it.

If this wasn’t all adequate to contemplate, 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 claims 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 current dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career 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 present weak point in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to read in parts since it’s so verbose.

But given how rapidly the tech is progressing, I’m unsure the length of time I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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