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For Christmas I got a from a pal - my really own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a few easy prompts about me provided by my buddy Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty design of composing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and really verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

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

There are lots of business online offering AI -book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, because rotating from assembling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

I'm not asking you to buy 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 anyone's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, produced by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is meant as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He wants to broaden his variety, producing various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - offering AI -generated items to human consumers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce similar content based upon it.

"We ought to be clear, when we are talking about information here, we in fact mean human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is photos. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to learn how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song including AI -generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that it was not their work and they had actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And bytes-the-dust.com even though the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for creative purposes ought to be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without authorization ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful however let's build it morally and fairly."

OpenAI says 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 - including the BBC - have actually selected to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

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 messing up the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of delight," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining among its finest carrying out markets on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A government representative stated: "No move will be made up until we are absolutely confident we have a useful strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for right holders to assist them accredit their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a national data library containing public information from a vast array of sources will likewise be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 aimed to increase the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a number of suits versus AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually 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 companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of factors which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and whether it should be paying for it.

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

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

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually desire 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 larger tasks. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm uncertain the length of time I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are much better.

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