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

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a few simple triggers about me supplied by my pal Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of composing, however it's likewise a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's prompts in looking at information about me.

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

There's likewise a mystical, repeated hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on almost 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 told me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, because pivoting from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to generate them, based on an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in anyone's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, created by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

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

He hopes to widen his range, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human consumers.

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

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

"We should be clear, when we are talking about data here, we really suggest human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is photos. It's works of art. 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 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 actually not granted 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 wildly popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for creative purposes need to be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without consent need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective however let's construct it morally and relatively."

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

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use creators' material on the web to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He explains that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare 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 nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a lot of joy," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

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

A government spokesperson said: "No move will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to assist them accredit their material, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a nationwide data library consisting of public data from a vast array 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 security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is said to want the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a number of lawsuits against AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and asteroidsathome.net even a comic.

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

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

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

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology for a portion of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to check out in parts since it's so verbose.

But given how quickly the tech is developing, I'm unsure the length of time I can remain confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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