For Christmas I got a fascinating gift from a pal - my very own "best-selling" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent title) bears my name and my picture on its cover, and macphersonwiki.mywikis.wiki it has glowing reviews.

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

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

It mimics my chatty design of composing, but it's also a bit recurring, and very verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

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

There are dozens of business online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, since rotating from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The company utilizes 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 produced it, can buy any additional copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in anyone's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

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

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We need to be clear, when we are talking about information here, we really suggest human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. It's masterpieces. 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 networks before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for imaginative purposes must be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without approval need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely powerful but let's build it morally and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have actually decided to team up - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI developers to use developers' material on the web to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull 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, 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 markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and an entire lot of pleasure," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining among its finest carrying out markets on the vague pledge of development."

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

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a nationwide information library including public data from a wide variety of sources will likewise be made available to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to control 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 enhance the security of AI with, amongst other things, higgledy-piggledy.xyz firms in the sector required to share information of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is stated to want the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a variety of claims against AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They declare 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 business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of aspects which can make up reasonable 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 ought to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has 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 fraction of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to check out in parts since it's so verbose.

But offered how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain the length of time I can stay positive that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

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