For Christmas I received a fascinating gift from a pal - my very own “best-selling” book.

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a few basic triggers about me provided by my friend Janet.

It’s an intriguing read, and extremely funny in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is someplace in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It imitates my chatty style of composing, however it’s also a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet’s prompts in looking at data about me.

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

There’s also a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no animals). 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 called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally 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 costs ₤ 26. The firm uses its own AI tools to produce them, based upon an open source large language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in any person’s name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, galgbtqhistoryproject.org created by AI, and developed “exclusively to bring humour and delight”.

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 intends to broaden his variety, tandme.co.uk producing various categories such as sci-fi, and qoocle.com maybe using an autobiography service. It’s created to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human customers.

It’s likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to produce, wiki-tb-service.com and it does, definitely in some parts, sound simply like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have actually revealed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable material based upon it.

“We must be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we actually imply human developers’ life works,” states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard creators’ rights.

“This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. It’s masterpieces. It’s records … The whole point of AI training is to discover how to do something and then do more like that.”

In 2023 a song 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 not consented to it. It didn’t stop the track’s creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

“I do not believe the use of generative AI for creative purposes ought to be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals’s work without authorization must be prohibited,” Mr Newton Rex includes. “AI can be really powerful but let’s construct it morally and relatively.”

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

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to use developers’ content on the web to help establish their models, wiki.eqoarevival.com unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as “insanity”.

He points out that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

“All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and messing up the incomes of the country’s creatives,” he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also strongly versus removing copyright law for AI.

“Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a lot of happiness,” says 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 carrying out industries on the unclear pledge of development.”

A government spokesperson said: “No relocation will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them license their content, access to high-quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI designers.”

Under the UK government’s new AI strategy, a national information library consisting of public information from a large range of sources will also be provided 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 security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is said to want the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everyone 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 permission, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under “fair usage” and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of factors which can constitute fair use - it’s not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training information and whether it must be paying for it.

If this wasn’t all sufficient to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It became 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 concerns in the US, and threatens American’s existing supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly want a “bestseller” I’ll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to check out in parts because it’s so verbose.

But offered how quickly the tech is progressing, I’m not sure for how long I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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