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

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

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

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

It imitates my chatty design of composing, however it's also a bit repeated, and really verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's triggers in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of business online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, because pivoting from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source big language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anybody's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, akropolistravel.com created by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

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

He wants to widen his variety, creating different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human customers.

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

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

"We should be clear, when we are talking about data here, we in fact imply human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to learn how to do something and after that 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 granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for creative purposes must be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without permission must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's develop it ethically and relatively."

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

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

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

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is also highly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a whole lot of delight," says the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining one of its finest performing markets on the vague pledge of development."

A federal government representative said: "No move will be made till we are definitely positive we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to assist them license their content, access to top quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a nationwide information library containing public information from a large variety of sources will also be made offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to control 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 improve the safety of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is said to desire the AI sector to deal with less policy.

This comes as a variety of suits against AI firms, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

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

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of factors which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training information and whether it should be paying for it.

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

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

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.

But provided how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure how long I can stay confident that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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