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For Christmas I got an intriguing present from a buddy - 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 completely composed by AI, with a few basic prompts about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

There's also a strange, repeated hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no family pets). 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 called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, since 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 large language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in any person's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, produced by AI, oke.zone and scientific-programs.science created "solely to bring humour and joy".

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

He hopes to widen his range, creating different categories such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human clients.

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

Musicians, authors, artists and actors 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 must be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we actually imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's works of art. 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 networks 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 trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still .

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

OpenAI states Chinese competitors using its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and dents America's swagger

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

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He explains 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 changing copyright law and ruining the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of pleasure," says the Baroness, pipewiki.org who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining among its finest performing markets on the unclear promise of development."

A federal government representative stated: "No relocation will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a practical plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them license their content, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI designers."

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

In the US the future of federal rules 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 intended to increase the safety of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, wavedream.wiki music labels, and even a comedian.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the web without their authorization, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of aspects which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training data and whether it ought to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology for a portion of the rate of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's current dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But offered how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm uncertain the length of time I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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