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

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

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a few easy triggers about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty style of composing, but it's also a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in looking at 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, repetitive hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

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

When I contacted the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly 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 costs ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based upon an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in anybody's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He hopes to widen his range, generating different categories such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to create, wiki.insidertoday.org and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

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

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

"This is books, this is posts, this is images. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to find out how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a 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 not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think the usage of generative AI for innovative purposes need to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without approval need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective but let's construct it ethically and fairly."

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

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to utilize developers' material on the internet to assist develop their models, unless the rights holders opt 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, journalists and artists.

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

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise highly against removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a whole lot of delight," 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 markets on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A federal government representative said: "No move will be made until we are definitely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them license their material, access to premium product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a national information library consisting of public data from a large range of sources will likewise be offered to AI scientists.

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 intended to improve the safety of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has actually now been rescinded by Trump. It stays 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 particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the web without their consent, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety 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 information and whether it must be paying for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It became the many downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it developed 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.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I really want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It is complete of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But given how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain for how long I can stay confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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