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

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

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a couple of basic triggers about me supplied by my friend Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty style of composing, however it's likewise a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's triggers in collating information about me.

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

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

There are lots of business online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, because pivoting from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in anyone's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, created by AI, and created "solely to bring humour and delight".

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

He hopes to expand his variety, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human clients.

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

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

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

"This is books, this is posts, this is images. It's works of art. 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 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 actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for creative functions ought to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without approval ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's build it morally and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have picked to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have decided to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to utilize creators' material on the web to help develop their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He explains that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare 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 country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise strongly against removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a whole lot of pleasure," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining one of its finest performing industries on the vague promise of development."

A government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them certify their material, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a national information library including public information from a wide variety of sources will also be made available to AI scientists.

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 enhance 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 launched.

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

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI firms, and elearnportal.science particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their approval, and used 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 factors which can constitute reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training data and whether it ought to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the many downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

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

When it comes to me and a profession 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 weak point in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But provided how quickly the tech is developing, I'm not exactly sure how long I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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