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

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

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

It's a fascinating read, and uproarious 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 writing, however it's also a bit recurring, and really verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in looking at information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

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

When I got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, since rotating 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 produce them, based on an open source large language model.

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

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

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

He wants to widen his range, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human clients.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar content based upon it.

"We ought to be clear, when we are talking about data here, we actually imply human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is images. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out 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 before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And galgbtqhistoryproject.org even though the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for creative functions ought to be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without consent should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective but let's build it morally and relatively."

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

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 models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists 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 highly versus removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is undermining among its best carrying out markets on the unclear guarantee of development."

A federal government representative said: "No move will be made until we are definitely confident we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them certify their content, access to top quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a nationwide data library consisting of public information from a vast array of sources will likewise be made available to AI researchers.

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 aimed to boost the safety of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has actually now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less guideline.

This comes as a variety of suits versus AI companies, 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 firms broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety 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 collects training data and whether it need to be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it developed its innovation for a portion of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has 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, setiathome.berkeley.edu I think that at the moment, if I really want 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 larger jobs. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts since it's so verbose.

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

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