For Christmas I got an interesting gift from a friend - my really own "best-selling" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (fantastic title) bears my name and my photo on its cover, and it has glowing evaluations.

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

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

It simulates my chatty style of writing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's triggers in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a strange, repeated hallucination in the type of my cat (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 composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, since rotating 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 upon an open source big language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody developing one in anybody's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, created by AI, and bbarlock.com designed "entirely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He wants to widen his range, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human customers.

It's likewise 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 generate, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound simply like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce similar material based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are talking about information here, we actually mean human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is photos. It's works of art. It's records ... The entire 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 because it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe the use of generative AI for creative functions should be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without consent should be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective but let's construct it fairly and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually picked to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have decided to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to utilize developers' material on the web to help develop their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He explains that AI can make advances in areas 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 messing up 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 great deal of pleasure," 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 guarantee of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made till we are definitely confident we have a practical plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them accredit their material, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a national information library including public information from a large range of sources will also be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 aimed to increase the of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

But this has now been repealed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less regulation.

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

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the web without their authorization, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and oke.zone 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 examination over how it gathers training information and whether it must be paying for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it established its technology for a portion of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite hard to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is developing, I'm unsure for how long I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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