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For Christmas I received an interesting gift from a good friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a few easy prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

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

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

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

There's also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no pets). And wiki.dulovic.tech 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 got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, because 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 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 anyone 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 mentioning that it is fictional, produced by AI, and designed "entirely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He hopes to widen his variety, creating different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - offering AI -generated goods to human customers.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound simply like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are talking about data here, we in fact mean human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to learn how to do something and then 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 because it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for imaginative purposes ought to be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without consent must be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really effective but let's develop it ethically and relatively."

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

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in areas like defence, akropolistravel.com 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 incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The federal government is undermining among its finest carrying out markets on the unclear pledge of development."

A government spokesperson said: "No move will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their material, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a national data library consisting of public information from a large range of sources will also be made readily available to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 enhance the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been rescinded 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 claims versus AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the web without their consent, and used it to train their systems.

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

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

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

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure the length of time I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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