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

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

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a few basic prompts about me supplied by my buddy Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty style of composing, but it's also a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's triggers in collating data about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no family 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 called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, since rotating from putting together 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 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 created it, can purchase any additional copies.

There is presently no barrier to anyone producing one in anyone's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, created by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and pleasure".

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

He wishes to expand his variety, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and possibly offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are talking about information here, we actually imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is pictures. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire 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 since it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for imaginative purposes should be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without approval must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really effective but let's construct it fairly and relatively."

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China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and dents America's swagger

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

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to utilize developers' content on the internet to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare 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 likewise highly against removing 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 government is undermining among its finest carrying out industries on the unclear pledge of growth."

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

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a national data library containing public information from a wide variety of sources will also be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 intended to improve the safety of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has actually now been rescinded by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is said to desire the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and it-viking.ch even a comedian.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their consent, and used it to train their systems.

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

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

DeepSeek claims that it established its innovation for a fraction of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I really want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It is full of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts since it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain for how long I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

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