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For Christmas I got a fascinating gift from a friend - my extremely own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a couple of simple prompts about me provided by my good friend Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit repeated, and very verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in collecting data about me.

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

There's likewise a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the kind 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 AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, because pivoting from putting together 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 on an open source big language design.

I'm not asking you to buy my book. Actually you can't - just Janet, who created it, can purchase any additional copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone producing one in anyone's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, created by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wants to broaden his range, generating various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human consumers.

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

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

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

"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to discover how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for creative purposes ought to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without consent ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really effective however let's construct it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have picked to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have chosen to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to utilize creators' content on the internet to help establish their models, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He points out 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 changing copyright law and destroying the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise strongly versus getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and an entire lot of delight," states the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening one of its best carrying out markets on the unclear guarantee of development."

A government representative said: "No move will be made up until we are absolutely confident we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to assist them accredit their content, access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide data library consisting of public information from a broad variety of sources will likewise be provided 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 intended to boost the security of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is said to want the AI sector to deal with less policy.

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

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

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

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

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

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly want 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 mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

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

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