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For Christmas I received an interesting gift from a good friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

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

It's an interesting read, astroberry.io and very funny in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is someplace in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of writing, however it's likewise a bit recurring, and very verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collecting data about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no family pets). And wavedream.wiki there's a metaphor on practically 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 president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, because pivoting from compiling 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 upon an open source large language design.

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

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

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

He hopes to expand his variety, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human customers.

It's likewise a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound simply like me.

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

"We should be clear, when we are discussing data here, we in fact mean human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is photos. It's works of art. 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 song including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had not granted 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 extremely popular.

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

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have chosen to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to utilize creators' material on the internet to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders choose 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, reporters and artists.

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

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is likewise highly versus removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of pleasure," states the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for forum.batman.gainedge.org Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

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

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

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a national information library containing public information from a vast array of sources will also be made readily available to AI scientists.

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

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to boost the security of AI with, among other things, firms in the sector required to share details of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has actually now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is said to want the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

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

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the web without their consent, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of aspects which can constitute fair use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training information and whether it should be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a portion of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's current dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But provided how quickly the tech is developing, I'm uncertain the length of time I can remain confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

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