For Christmas I received a fascinating present from a good friend - 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 totally composed by AI, with a few simple triggers about me provided by my friend Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and really funny in parts. But it also 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 likewise a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collating data about me.

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

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

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

When I got in touch with the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had 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 company utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source big 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 anybody developing one in anyone's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and delight".

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

He intends to widen his variety, producing various genres such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, pipewiki.org definitely in some parts, sound similar to 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 comparable content based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are discussing information here, we actually indicate human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects 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 discover how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a tune including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that 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 although the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for imaginative purposes should be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without approval must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really powerful but let's build it morally and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have picked to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have decided to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to use creators' content on the internet to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

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

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

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

"The government is undermining one of its finest carrying out industries on the vague pledge of development."

A federal government representative said: "No move will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a practical strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for right holders to help them certify their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide data 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 control 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 improve the security of AI with, among other things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is said to want the AI sector to deal with less regulation.

This comes as a variety of claims against AI companies, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their approval, 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 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 gathers training data and whether it should be spending for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being the a lot of downloaded 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 concerns in the US, and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

But offered how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure for how long I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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