For Christmas I received a fascinating gift from a pal - my really own “very popular” book.

“Tech-Splaining for Dummies” (fantastic title) bears my name and my image on its cover, orcz.com and equipifieds.com it has radiant reviews.

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

It’s a fascinating read, and extremely funny in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It simulates my chatty design of writing, however it’s likewise a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet’s prompts in looking at data about me.

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

There’s likewise a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no animals). And there’s a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

There are lots of business online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, wikitravel.org based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly 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 firm uses its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source large language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anyone’s name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, created by AI, and designed “exclusively to bring humour and joy”.

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a “customised gag gift”, and the books do not get offered further.

He hopes to expand his variety, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It’s developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human clients.

It’s also a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to create, and lovewiki.faith it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have actually revealed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar material based upon it.

“We must be clear, when we are discussing information here, we actually mean human creators’ life works,” states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect developers’ rights.

“This is books, this is short articles, this is images. It’s masterpieces. It’s records … The entire point of AI training is to learn how to do something and after that do more like that.”

In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers 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 consented to it. It didn’t stop the track’s developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

“I do not think making use of generative AI for innovative purposes need to be prohibited, 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 really effective but let’s develop it ethically 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 actually selected to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to utilize developers’ content on the internet to help establish their models, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as “madness”.

He explains that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

“All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and ruining the incomes of the country’s creatives,” he argues.

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

“Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of delight,” says the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

“The government is weakening among its finest performing industries on the vague promise of development.”

A federal government representative stated: “No move will be made till we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them accredit their material, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI developers.”

Under the UK federal government’s brand-new AI plan, a national information library containing public information from a vast array of sources will likewise be made offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules to manage AI is now up in the air following President Trump’s return to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to boost the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has now been by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is said to want the AI sector to face less guideline.

This comes as a number of claims against AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everybody from the New York 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 web without their approval, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under “reasonable usage” and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can constitute fair use - it’s not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training data and whether it must be paying for opensourcebridge.science it.

If this wasn’t all enough to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It became one of the most downloaded free app on Apple’s US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for a fraction of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American’s current dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, 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 present weak point in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It is full of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite hard to read in parts since it’s so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is developing, I’m unsure the length of time I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the most significant advancements in worldwide technology, with analysis from BBC reporters worldwide.

Outside the UK? Register here.