For I received an interesting present from a buddy - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a couple of simple prompts about me supplied by my buddy Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty design of composing, but it's also a bit recurring, and really verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.

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

There's also a strange, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no family pets). 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 offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, since pivoting from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based upon an open source big language design.

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

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

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wishes to widen his range, creating different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human consumers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound simply 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 talking about information here, we really indicate human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, annunciogratis.net which campaigns for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's artworks. 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 including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for imaginative purposes need to be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without consent should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really powerful however let's develop it morally and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have selected to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have decided to team up - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use creators' content on the web to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and setiathome.berkeley.edu artists.

"All of these things work without going and altering 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 versus removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of delight," says the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

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

A federal government representative said: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a practical strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for right holders to assist them license their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a nationwide data library including public data from a large range of sources will likewise be made offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 intended to improve the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share information of the operations 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, however he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI firms, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have 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 content from the internet without their permission, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are for that reason 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 analysis over how it collects training data and whether it ought to be paying for it.

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

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

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It is complete of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

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

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