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

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a couple of simple triggers about me provided by my pal Janet.

It's a fascinating 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 design of writing, however it's also a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's triggers in collecting information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the form 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 called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold 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 firm uses its own AI tools to create them, based upon an open source large language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in anyone's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, produced by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and delight".

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

He wishes to broaden his range, producing different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human consumers.

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

Musicians, authors, utahsyardsale.com artists and actors worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are discussing data here, we actually suggest human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard creators' 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 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 due to the fact that it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for innovative functions must be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without approval should be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really effective however let's build it morally and relatively."

OpenAI states Chinese rivals utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes market and damages America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to utilize developers' content on the web to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He mentions 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 ruining the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, higgledy-piggledy.xyz is likewise highly versus removing copyright law for AI.

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

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

A government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made until we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them accredit their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a national data library consisting of public data from a broad variety of sources will also be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to manage 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 boost the security of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the workings 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 rather, however he is stated to want the AI sector to face less guideline.

This comes as a variety of claims against AI companies, and particularly against 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 content from the web without their approval, and utilized it to train their systems.

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

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

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

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It is full of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm not sure how long I can remain confident that my considerably slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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