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For Christmas I received an intriguing present from a buddy - my really own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me provided by my friend Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of composing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's triggers in looking at information 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, repeated hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

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

When I called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, because 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 utilizes its own AI tools to produce them, based on an open source large language model.

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

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

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is intended as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered further.

He intends to expand 35.237.164.2 his variety, generating various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - selling AI -generated products to human clients.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound much like me.

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

"We must be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we really indicate human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. 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 featuring 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 actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And although 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, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without approval ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective however let's build it morally and fairly."

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DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

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

In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have selected to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually chosen to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He mentions 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 home of Lords, is also highly against removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is weakening among its finest carrying out markets on the unclear promise of development."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made up until we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them license their content, access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a nationwide information library containing public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise be made offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 aimed to improve the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It stays 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 against AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually 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 content from the internet without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of aspects which can make up fair usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training information and whether it need to be paying for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a portion of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

But provided how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm unsure how long I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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