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For Christmas I got a fascinating present from a good friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of writing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's triggers in looking at information about me.

Several sentences begin "as a leading innovation journalist ..." - 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 family pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of business online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, given that pivoting from compiling 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 produce them, based on an open source large language design.

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

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

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He wishes to expand his range, producing various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound simply like me.

Musicians, hikvisiondb.webcam authors, artists and stars worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out comparable content based upon it.

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

"This is books, this is articles, this is photos. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to discover 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 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 creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for creative functions should be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without permission need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's develop it fairly and relatively."

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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 chosen to team up - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator drapia.org OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use developers' material on the internet to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He points out 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 destroying the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also strongly versus removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a whole lot of joy," 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 performing industries on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A government representative stated: "No relocation will be made until we are definitely confident we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them accredit their content, 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 consisting of public information from a wide variety of sources will also 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 aimed to improve the safety of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector required to share details of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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 regulation.

This comes as a number of suits versus AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everybody from the New York 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 web without their authorization, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of aspects which can make up fair usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training information and whether it should be paying for it.

If this wasn't all enough to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It became one of the most downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

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

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It is full of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

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

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