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

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent title) bears my name and pipewiki.org my image on its cover, and it has glowing evaluations.

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

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

It imitates my chatty style of writing, however it's also a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

There's also a strange, repeated hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens 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 personalised books, generally in the US, because 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 produce 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 anyone's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and joy".

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

He intends to widen his range, producing different genres 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 customers.

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

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we actually suggest human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is photos. It's artworks. 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 tune featuring 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 consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And utahsyardsale.com even though the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for imaginative functions ought to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without permission ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective however let's build it ethically and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese competitors utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

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

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He mentions that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare 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 country's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The government is undermining one of its finest carrying out markets on the vague guarantee of growth."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to help them accredit their material, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide data library containing public data from a vast array of sources will also be made readily available to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 boost the safety of AI with, ai-db.science to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is said to want the AI sector to deal with less policy.

This comes as a number of lawsuits versus AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content 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 scrutiny over how it collects training information and whether it should be paying for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to contemplate, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being the many downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it established its innovation for a portion of the price 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 profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite hard to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not exactly sure how long I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are much better.

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