GitLab

For Christmas I received a fascinating present from a buddy - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a few basic prompts about me provided by my good friend Janet.

It's a fascinating read, and really funny 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 style of writing, however it's also a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's triggers in collecting information about me.

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

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

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

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, given that pivoting from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is planned as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wishes to expand his variety, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - offering AI-generated products to human clients.

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

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

"We must be clear, when we are talking about information here, we actually suggest human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to find out how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a tune including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and engel-und-waisen.de The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for innovative purposes ought to be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without approval should be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective however let's build it ethically and relatively."

OpenAI states Chinese competitors using its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and damages America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have selected to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use creators' content on the internet to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He explains 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 your house of Lords, is also strongly against eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a lot of happiness," states the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening one of its best carrying out markets on the vague guarantee of development."

A government representative said: "No move will be made till we are definitely confident we have a practical strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them accredit their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a national information containing public information from a large range of sources will likewise be made available to AI scientists.

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 boost the safety of AI with, to name a few 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 remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is said to desire the AI sector to face less guideline.

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

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their permission, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason 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 must be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for a fraction of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm uncertain how long I can stay confident that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the greatest advancements in global innovation, with analysis from BBC correspondents worldwide.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.