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

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a few basic prompts about me supplied by my pal Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit repeated, and very verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the type of my cat (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 writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, considering that rotating from compiling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source big language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, created by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is planned as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered even more.

He intends to broaden his range, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human clients.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we really imply human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short 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 tune including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks 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 although the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think the usage of generative AI for creative functions need to be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without consent must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective however let's build it fairly and relatively."

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

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to use developers' content on the web to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders decide 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, journalists 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 the House of Lords, is likewise strongly versus getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is undermining among its best carrying out markets on the vague guarantee of development."

A government representative stated: "No relocation will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them license their content, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a national data library including public information from a large range of sources will also be provided to AI scientists.

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

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to enhance the security of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten 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 material 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 therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can make up fair usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. 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 adequate to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It became one of the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its technology for a fraction of the cost 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 career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts because it's so verbose.

But given how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm uncertain the length of time I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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