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For Christmas I received a fascinating present from a good friend - my really own "best-selling" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent title) bears my name and my photo on its cover, and it has radiant evaluations.

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a few simple prompts about me provided by my friend Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty design of writing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's triggers in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the form of my feline (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 composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, primarily 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 expenses ₤ 26. The firm utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in anybody's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, produced by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is intended as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get offered further.

He wants to widen his variety, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human customers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound simply like me.

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

"We must be clear, when we are discussing data here, we actually suggest human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. It's works of art. 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 tune featuring AI -generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that it was not their work and they had actually 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 phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think the usage of generative AI for imaginative purposes need to be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without consent need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective but let's construct it ethically and fairly."

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 actually chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use creators' material on the web to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists 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 also highly versus removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs 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 federal government is weakening one of its finest carrying out markets on the unclear promise of development."

A government representative stated: "No move will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a practical plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to assist them accredit their material, access to premium material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a national information library including public data from a vast array of sources will also be made available to AI researchers.

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 safety of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector required to share details of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been rescinded by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is said to want the AI sector ai-db.science to face less regulation.

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

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their consent, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of elements which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it training information and whether it need to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector drapia.org over the past week. It became one of the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

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

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.

But provided how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not sure for how long I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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