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For Christmas I got an interesting present from a pal - my very own "best-selling" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (great title) bears my name and my image on its cover, and it has glowing reviews.

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a few basic prompts about me supplied by my friend Janet.

It's an interesting read, and really funny in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and wiki.snooze-hotelsoftware.de a stream of anecdotes.

It simulates my chatty design of composing, however it's also a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's triggers 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 also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no pets). 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 told 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 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 produced it, can purchase any additional copies.

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and delight".

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

He intends to broaden his range, producing various genres such as sci-fi, and possibly offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound much like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors 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 mean human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is images. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to find out how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a tune including 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 actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for imaginative functions ought to be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without consent ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's construct it morally and fairly."

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

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to use developers' material on the internet to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He explains 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 incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The federal government is weakening one of its finest carrying out industries on the unclear guarantee of development."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to help them license their content, access to high-quality product 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 plan, a national information library including public information from a wide variety of sources will also be provided to AI researchers.

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

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to boost the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share details of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is said to desire the AI sector to deal with less regulation.

This comes as a number of lawsuits against AI firms, and especially against 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 internet without their permission, and utilized it to train their systems.

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

If this wasn't all enough to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It became the a lot of downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology for a fraction of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It is full of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to read in parts because it's so verbose.

But offered how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure how long I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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