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

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

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a few simple prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty design of composing, however it's likewise a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

There are lots 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 told me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, because pivoting from compiling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anybody's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, created by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and joy".

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

He wants to widen his range, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - offering AI-generated items to human consumers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you compose for akropolistravel.com a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly 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 comparable content based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are discussing information here, we actually imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is pictures. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to learn 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 since it was not their work and they had actually 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 phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for imaginative purposes need to be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without consent need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective however let's develop it fairly and relatively."

OpenAI states Chinese competitors using 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 selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to team up - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

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

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and ruining the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The federal government is undermining among its best performing markets on the unclear pledge of development."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made until we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them accredit their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a national data library consisting of public data from a large range of sources will also be provided to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 required to share information of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is said to desire the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a number of suits versus AI companies, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the web without their permission, and utilized 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 elements which can constitute reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector kenpoguy.com is under increasing scrutiny over how it training data and whether it must be paying for it.

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

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

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

But given how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure the length of time I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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