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

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me provided by my friend 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 trade-britanica.trade a stream of anecdotes.

It imitates my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's triggers in collating data about me.

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

There's likewise a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

There are lots of business online offering AI -book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, given that pivoting from assembling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The firm utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based upon an open source big .

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in anybody's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, library.kemu.ac.ke however Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is planned as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He hopes to widen his variety, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - offering AI -generated goods to human consumers.

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

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

"We should be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we actually indicate human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is photos. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to discover how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a song 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 actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for innovative functions ought to be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without approval must be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very powerful however let's construct it morally and relatively."

OpenAI says Chinese competitors using 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 - including the BBC - have actually selected to block AI designers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have actually decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use developers' content on the web to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He explains that AI can make advances in locations like defence, 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 country's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The federal government is weakening among its finest carrying out markets on the vague pledge of growth."

A government spokesperson said: "No move will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a practical strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their material, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a national information library including public information from a large range of sources will likewise be provided 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 aimed to enhance the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share details of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less guideline.

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

They declare that the AI companies 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 "fair usage" 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 collects training data and whether it must be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a fraction of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly desire 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 projects. It is full of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But offered how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure for how long I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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