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For Christmas I got an intriguing present from a pal - my very own "best-selling" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (terrific title) bears my name and my picture on its cover, pl.velo.wiki and it has radiant reviews.

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a couple of basic prompts about me provided by my buddy Janet.

It's a fascinating read, and really amusing in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, and is someplace in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It simulates my chatty style of writing, however it's likewise a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating 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 mystical, repetitive hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

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

When I called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, kenpoguy.com primarily in the US, because pivoting 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 create 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 created it, can order any more copies.

There is presently no barrier to anyone producing one in any person's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, created by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is planned as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He wishes to broaden his variety, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI -generated goods to human customers.

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

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then produce similar content based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are talking about data here, we actually suggest human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is photos. It's works of art. 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 tune featuring AI -generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe the use of generative AI for creative functions must be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without permission ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective however let's build it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have selected to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have chosen to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to content on the internet to help establish their models, archmageriseswiki.com unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He mentions 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 changing copyright law and ruining the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also highly against eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of joy," says the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening among its best performing industries on the unclear promise of growth."

A federal government representative stated: "No move will be made till we are definitely confident we have a useful plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their material, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide information library containing public information from a vast array of sources will also be offered to AI scientists.

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 intended to boost the safety of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector required to share information 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 desire the AI sector to face less guideline.

This comes as a number of suits against AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the web without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of factors which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training data and whether it must be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It became one of the most downloaded free 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 raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

But given how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not sure the length of time I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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