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For Christmas I got a fascinating present from a good friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a few easy triggers about me provided by my pal Janet.

It's an intriguing 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 imitates my chatty style of composing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collecting data about me.

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

There's likewise a mystical, 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 companies online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, given that rotating from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

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

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He wants to broaden his variety, creating different genres such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human consumers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you compose 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 much like me.

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

"We should be clear, when we are talking about data here, we in fact mean human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is images. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to discover how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks 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 creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for imaginative purposes should be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without permission must be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective however let's construct it morally and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have picked to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually decided to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator pyra-handheld.com OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI developers to use developers' content on the web to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex describes 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 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 house of Lords, is likewise highly against removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and an entire lot of happiness," says the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening among its best performing markets on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A government representative stated: "No move will be made till we are absolutely positive we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them license their material, access to premium material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a nationwide data library consisting of public data from a large range of sources will also be offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to manage AI is now up in the air following President Trump's return to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to boost the security of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

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

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their authorization, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of elements which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it need to be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it established its innovation for a fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the moment, bbarlock.com if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to check out in parts since it's so verbose.

But given how the tech is developing, I'm unsure how long I can stay positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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