For Christmas I received an interesting gift from a buddy - my really own "best-selling" book.

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

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

It's a fascinating read, and very amusing in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of composing, however it's also a bit recurring, and extremely verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

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

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

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

When I called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, since pivoting from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source large language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, created by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is planned as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He wishes to broaden his range, creating different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI-generated products to human customers.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

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

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

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's works of art. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out 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 media 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 nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for creative functions need to be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without approval should be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's develop it fairly and fairly."

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

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to use creators' material on the web to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He points out that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare 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 nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a lot of pleasure," states the Baroness, wolvesbaneuo.com who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening among its best performing markets on the vague guarantee of development."

A government representative said: "No move will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them accredit their content, access to premium 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 nationwide data library consisting of public data from a large variety of sources will also be made readily available to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules to manage AI is now up in the air following President Trump's return to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to improve the security of AI with, among 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 actually now been reversed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is stated to want the AI sector to face less guideline.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everyone 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 material from the web without their approval, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of aspects which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training data and whether it ought to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to ponder, 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 claims that it established its technology for a fraction of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to read in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm unsure for how long I can remain confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

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