For Christmas I got a fascinating gift from a friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a few simple triggers about me provided by my good friend Janet.

It's an interesting read, and very 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 imitates my chatty design of writing, asteroidsathome.net but it's also a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have surpassed 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 mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on nearly 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 primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised 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 firm uses its own AI tools to produce them, based on an open source big language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody developing 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 created "exclusively 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 even more.

He hopes to widen his variety, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human customers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound much like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have revealed 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 discussing data here, we actually imply human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is images. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to find out how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a song including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks 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 attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for imaginative functions ought to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without consent should be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's develop it fairly and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have picked to block AI designers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have actually 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' content on the web to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

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

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

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

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

"The government is undermining among its finest performing industries on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to assist them certify their material, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a nationwide information library containing public information from a large range of sources will also be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 intended to improve the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a number of lawsuits versus AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the web without their approval, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies 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 meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it should be paying for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it established its innovation for a portion of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm uncertain how long I can remain positive that my considerably slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

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