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

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and very amusing in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of composing, but it's likewise a bit repeated, and really verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

Several sentences start "as a leading technology journalist ..." - 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 business online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, because pivoting 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 generate them, based upon an open source big language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in anyone's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, developed by AI, and designed "entirely to bring humour and pleasure".

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

He wants to expand his variety, creating different genres such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - selling AI-generated items to human consumers.

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

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

"We need to be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we in fact suggest human creators' life works," says 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 works of art. 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 tune featuring 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 choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for imaginative functions should be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without consent must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective however let's construct it morally and relatively."

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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 work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to use creators' content on the internet to assist establish their models, bphomesteading.com unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He explains 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 altering copyright law and messing up the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and an entire lot of pleasure," states the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

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

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

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a national data library consisting of public data from a vast array of sources will also be provided to AI .

In the US the future of federal rules to control 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 increase the safety of AI with, among other things, firms in the sector required to share details of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has actually now been reversed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less guideline.

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

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the web without their consent, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can constitute 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 need to be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it established its technology for a portion of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It is full of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to read in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

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

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