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

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a few easy triggers about me supplied by my good friend 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 mimics my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit recurring, and very verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

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

There are dozens of companies online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, since rotating from assembling 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 produce them, based upon an open source big language design.

I'm not asking you to buy my book. Actually you can't - just Janet, who created it, can order any more copies.

There is presently no barrier to anyone creating one in anybody's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and created "solely to bring humour and joy".

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

He hopes to widen his range, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human consumers.

It's also 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 produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We need to be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we really imply human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is photos. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to find out how to do something and after that 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 because it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for innovative functions ought to be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without permission must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really effective but let's construct it fairly and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have picked to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for bytes-the-dust.com instance.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to use creators' material on the internet to assist develop their models, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations 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 country's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The federal government is weakening one of its best performing industries on the vague guarantee of growth."

A government representative said: "No move will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to assist them certify their material, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a national information library containing public data from a wide variety of sources will also be made offered 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 aimed to improve the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the workings 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 instead, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a number of claims versus AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

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

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can make up fair usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training information and whether it must be paying for it.

If this wasn't all enough to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It became the many downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for a fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

But offered how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure how long I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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