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

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a couple of simple triggers about me provided by my good friend Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit recurring, and extremely verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no 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 got in touch with the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, mainly 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 firm uses its own AI tools to create them, based upon an open source big language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anybody's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, created by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "personalised gag gift", and wikibase.imfd.cl the books do not get sold further.

He hopes to broaden his range, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human customers.

It's likewise a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably took less than a minute to create, and it does, canadasimple.com definitely in some parts, sound simply like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have 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 talking about data here, we really imply human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies 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 featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not consented to 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 hugely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for innovative purposes should be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without permission ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really effective however let's build it ethically and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have selected to block AI designers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have chosen to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use developers' material on the internet to help develop their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

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 destroying the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The government is weakening one of its best carrying out markets on the vague guarantee of development."

A federal government representative said: "No move will be made till we are absolutely positive we have a practical strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for right holders to assist them certify their material, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide data library containing public information from a large range of sources will likewise be made available 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 boost the safety of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector required to share information of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is said to want the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a number of suits versus AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr music labels, and even a comic.

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of elements which can constitute reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training information and whether it need to be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology for a fraction of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I really 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 tasks. It is complete of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to check out in parts since it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm unsure for how long I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and skills, are much better.

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