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

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a couple of simple prompts about me supplied by my buddy Janet.

It's a fascinating read, and uproarious 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 writing, however it's likewise a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's triggers in looking at data about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on practically 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 got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, since rotating from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to create 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 created it, can buy any additional copies.

There is currently no barrier to anybody developing one in anyone's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and created "solely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He intends to widen his variety, creating different categories such as sci-fi, and possibly providing 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 write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound much like me.

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

"We must be clear, when we are discussing information here, we really suggest human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to learn how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for innovative purposes ought to be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without authorization should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely powerful but let's construct it ethically and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually chosen to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have actually decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI developers to utilize developers' content on the web to help establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He mentions 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 altering copyright law and ruining the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The government is weakening one of its finest performing industries on the vague guarantee of development."

A federal government representative said: "No relocation will be made till we are definitely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them license their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a national data library containing public information from a wide variety of sources will also be offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 intended to increase the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share details of the operations 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, however he is stated to want the AI sector to deal with less policy.

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

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the web without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

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

If this wasn't all adequate to contemplate, prazskypantheon.cz Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being the a lot of downloaded totally 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 actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I really want 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 tasks. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite hard to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But offered how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure for how long I can stay confident that my considerably slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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