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

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a few easy prompts about me supplied by my friend Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of composing, but it's also a bit repeated, and really verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, in the type of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on practically 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 called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 customised 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 expenses ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to generate them, based on an open source large language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in anybody's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He intends to expand his range, generating various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI-generated items to human consumers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

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

"We must be clear, when we are discussing information here, we actually mean human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's works of art. 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 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 not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for imaginative functions need to be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without permission must be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really effective but let's build it ethically and fairly."

OpenAI says Chinese rivals 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 - consisting of the BBC - have actually picked to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have decided to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to use creators' material on the web to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He points out 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 altering copyright law and messing up the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

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

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

A government representative said: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them accredit their material, access to premium product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a national information library consisting of public information from a vast array of sources will also be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 aimed to increase the security of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector required to share details of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are released.

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

This comes as a number of suits versus AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everyone 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 content from the internet without their approval, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of factors which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and complexityzoo.net whether it need to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It became one of the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established 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.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I actually 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 bigger jobs. It is complete of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

But given how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm unsure the length of time I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

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