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For Christmas I received a fascinating present from a friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

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

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

It mimics my chatty design of writing, however it's likewise a bit repeated, and very verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's triggers in looking at 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 kind of my cat (I have no pets). 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 offered around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, since rotating from putting together AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to produce 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 created it, can order any additional copies.

There is presently no barrier to anyone creating one in any person's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, produced by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and delight".

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

He hopes to broaden his variety, generating different categories 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 items to human consumers.

It's also a bit scary if, bybio.co like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We must be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we really indicate human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. It's works of art. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to discover how to do something and after that 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 since it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

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

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually chosen to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online material for bybio.co training purposes. Others have decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to utilize developers' material on the web to help develop their models, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

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

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

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a whole lot of happiness," states the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining one of its finest carrying out industries on the unclear guarantee of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely positive we have a practical plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them license their content, access to premium material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a nationwide data library containing public information from a vast array of sources will likewise be made readily available to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to control 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, among other things, companies in the sector required to share information of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.

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

This comes as a number of lawsuits against AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everybody from the New york city 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 variety of aspects which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training information and whether it should 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 one of the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims 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 profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I really want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It is complete of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

But provided how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm not sure for how long I can remain positive that my substantially slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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