For Christmas I received an interesting present 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 radiant reviews.

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a couple of simple triggers about me supplied by my pal Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty design of writing, but it's also a bit recurring, and extremely verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

There's likewise a mystical, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on practically 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 president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, considering that pivoting from assembling 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 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 more copies.

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in any person's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He wishes to broaden his variety, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and possibly offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human clients.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

Musicians, kenpoguy.com authors, artists and actors worldwide have actually 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 information here, we in fact imply human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to learn how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a song 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 granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe the use of generative AI for creative purposes need to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without permission ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really effective but let's construct it fairly 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 market and dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually picked to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI developers to use 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 locations 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 country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is also strongly versus getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of joy," says the Baroness, who is likewise 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 vague promise of growth."

A government representative stated: "No move will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a useful strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for right holders to assist them certify their content, access to high-quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a national information library containing public data from a large range of sources will likewise be offered to AI researchers.

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 boost 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 federal government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is stated to want the AI sector gratisafhalen.be to face less policy.

This comes as a number of suits versus AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, 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, iwatex.com and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of elements which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training data and whether it ought to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the a lot of downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for a portion of the rate of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But provided how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure how long I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the biggest developments in global technology, with analysis from BBC reporters all over the world.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.