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

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a few basic prompts about me provided by my friend Janet.

It's an interesting read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It simulates my chatty design of writing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's triggers in collating data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on almost 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 chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, because rotating from assembling 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 generate them, based on an open source large language model.

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

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

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He wishes to broaden his variety, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI -generated items to human customers.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We need to be clear, when we are discussing information here, we actually indicate human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's artworks. 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 song including 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 trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for innovative purposes must be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without approval need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful however let's construct it fairly and fairly."

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

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to use developers' material on the internet to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

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

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and ruining the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is likewise strongly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and an entire lot of pleasure," 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 industries on the unclear promise of development."

A government representative said: "No relocation will be made till we are definitely positive we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them accredit their content, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

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

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

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to improve the safety of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a variety of lawsuits versus AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the web without their approval, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number 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 data and whether it should be paying for it.

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

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

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, qoocle.com if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to read in parts because it's so verbose.

But offered how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not sure the length of time I can remain positive that my considerably slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

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