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

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent title) bears my name and kenpoguy.com my photo on its cover, and it has glowing reviews.

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

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

It imitates my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit repeated, and really verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's triggers in collecting information about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of companies online offering AI -book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, given that rotating from compiling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The firm uses its own AI tools to generate them, passfun.awardspace.us based upon an open source large .

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in anyone's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

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

He wishes to widen his variety, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI -generated items to human consumers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have actually revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable material based upon it.

"We ought to be clear, when we are talking about data here, we actually imply human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. 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 song including AI -generated voices of Canadian singers 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 developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for creative purposes must be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without consent must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful however let's develop it fairly and fairly."

OpenAI says Chinese rivals utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

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

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have decided to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He points out 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 livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise highly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a whole lot of pleasure," states the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening one of its best carrying out markets on the vague promise of growth."

A government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them accredit their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide data library containing public data from a vast array of sources will likewise be made offered 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 aimed to improve the security of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector required to share details of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been rescinded by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is said to want the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a number of claims against AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everybody from the New york city 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 permission, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of aspects which can constitute 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 should be paying for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it developed its innovation for a fraction of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I really want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for ai Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to check out in parts since it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm unsure how long I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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