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For Christmas I got a fascinating present from a pal - my really own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a few simple prompts about me provided by my good friend Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of writing, however it's likewise a bit repeated, and very verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's triggers in collating data about me.

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

There's also a strange, repeated hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on nearly 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 informed me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, considering that pivoting from compiling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 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 - just Janet, who created it, can buy any more copies.

There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in anyone's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, created by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He wants to expand his range, generating various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI -generated items 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 create, and it does, certainly in some parts, bphomesteading.com sound similar to me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being utilized 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 in fact mean human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect creators' 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 discover how to do something and after that 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 due to the fact that it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for innovative purposes must be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without permission should be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective but let's construct it fairly and fairly."

OpenAI says Chinese competitors using its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

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

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

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

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 altering copyright law and ruining the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is likewise strongly against removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of joy," says the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening among its best carrying out industries on the unclear promise of growth."

A federal government representative stated: "No relocation will be made until we are definitely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them certify their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

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

In the US the future of federal rules to manage AI is now up in the air following President Trump's go back to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to increase the security of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

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

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI companies, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

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

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can constitute reasonable 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 spending for it.

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

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

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to read in parts since it's so verbose.

But offered how quickly the tech is developing, I'm not sure for how long I can remain positive that my substantially slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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