one-up

For Christmas I got an interesting gift from a friend - my really own "best-selling" book.

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

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

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

It mimics my chatty style of writing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically 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 called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, considering that pivoting from putting together AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The firm uses its own AI tools to produce them, based on an open source large language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody developing one in anybody's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, created by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wishes to widen his range, generating various categories such as sci-fi, yewiki.org and maybe using an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI -generated products to human customers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We must be clear, when we are discussing information here, we in fact mean human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is pictures. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to learn how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song featuring AI -generated voices of 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 although the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for creative functions must be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without consent should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very powerful but let's construct it morally and relatively."

OpenAI states Chinese rivals utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes market and dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually picked to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have actually decided to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters 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 likewise highly versus removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is undermining one of its best performing industries on the unclear promise of development."

A government spokesperson said: "No move will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them certify their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a national data library consisting of public information from a large range of sources will also be made available to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 aimed to improve the security of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It stays 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 number of suits against AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten 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 material from the internet without their authorization, and utilized it to train their systems.

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

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

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for galgbtqhistoryproject.org a fraction of the rate of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

But given how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not exactly sure how long I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the most significant advancements in international technology, with analysis from BBC correspondents worldwide.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.