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For Christmas I got an intriguing 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 totally composed by AI, with a few simple triggers about me provided by my friend Janet.

It's a fascinating read, and very amusing in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, online-learning-initiative.org and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit recurring, and extremely verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's triggers in collecting 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 mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

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

When I called the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, given that 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 utilizes its own AI tools to produce 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 produced it, can purchase any further copies.

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating 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 imaginary, developed by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wants to broaden his variety, producing different genres such as sci-fi, and possibly offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - offering AI -generated products to human consumers.

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

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we actually suggest human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms 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 featuring AI -generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for creative purposes must be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without permission need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective however let's construct it fairly and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually chosen to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have chosen 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 designers to use developers' material on the web to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He explains that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and messing up the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is likewise strongly against removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a lot of delight," says the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening among its finest performing markets on the unclear promise of development."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made until we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them license their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

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

In the US the future of federal rules 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 safety of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less regulation.

This comes as a number of suits versus AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their authorization, and utilized it to train their systems.

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

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

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for a portion of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly want 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 jobs. It is full of errors and hallucinations, pipewiki.org and it can be rather hard to check out in parts since it's so verbose.

But provided how quickly the tech is developing, I'm not sure how long I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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