For Christmas I received an intriguing gift from a pal - my really own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a couple of basic triggers about me provided by my good friend Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit repeated, and very verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collecting data about me.

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

There's also a strange, repeated hallucination 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 dozens of companies online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, since rotating from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long ₤ 26. The firm uses its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source large language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in anybody's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, created by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is planned as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He wishes to widen his range, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to create, and it does, wiki.die-karte-bitte.de definitely in some parts, sound much like 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 similar material based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are discussing information here, we in fact indicate human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole 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 vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media 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 developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for imaginative purposes ought to be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without consent should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective but let's build it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have chosen to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in areas like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and destroying the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a whole lot of pleasure," says the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening among its best performing markets on the vague promise of growth."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them certify their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a national data library containing public data from a large range of sources will likewise be 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 intended to improve the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share information of the workings 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 instead, however he is stated to want the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a number of lawsuits versus AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everyone from the New york city 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 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 elements which can make up fair use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training data and whether it need to be spending for it.

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

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

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts because it's so verbose.

But offered how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not sure how long I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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