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For Christmas I got a fascinating present from a buddy - my very own "best-selling" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (great title) bears my name and my picture on its cover, higgledy-piggledy.xyz and it has radiant reviews.

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a couple of easy triggers about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty design of writing, however it's likewise a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in collecting 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 strange, repeated hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

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

When I contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally 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 costs ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source large language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anybody's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and pleasure".

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

He wants to widen his variety, producing various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of customer 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 create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are discussing information here, we in fact suggest human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is photos. It's masterpieces. 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 song including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists 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 creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe the use of generative AI for creative purposes need to be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without permission ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective but let's build it ethically and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually chosen to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online content for social.japrime.id training functions. Others have actually decided to team up - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use creators' material on the web to assist develop their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He explains 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 changing copyright law and ruining the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The government is undermining one of its best performing markets on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A government spokesperson said: "No move will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them license their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a nationwide data library including public information from a large range of sources will also be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 enhance the security of AI with, to name a few 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 desire the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a number of suits versus 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 material from the internet without their consent, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of elements which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it should be paying for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to consider, Chinese AI company 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 developed its technology for a fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure how long I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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