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

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

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a few easy prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty design of writing, koha-community.cz however it's likewise a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's triggers in looking at information about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repetitive hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on almost 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 got in touch with the primary executive 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 firm uses its own AI tools to generate them, based on an open source big language design.

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 presently no barrier to anyone producing one in anyone's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, developed by AI, and designed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

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

He hopes to widen his range, producing different genres such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it probably 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 similar material based upon it.

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

"This is books, this is posts, this is images. It's artworks. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to discover 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 media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not consented to 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 believe using generative AI for creative functions ought to be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without authorization should be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really powerful but let's construct it morally and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have chosen to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to utilize creators' content on the internet to help develop their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He explains 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 destroying the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also strongly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a whole lot of delight," says the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening among its finest carrying out industries on the unclear promise of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them accredit their content, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide information library consisting of public data from a vast array of sources will also be made offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 intended to enhance the safety of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is stated to want the AI sector trade-britanica.trade to deal with less policy.

This comes as a variety of claims against AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually 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 material from the internet without their consent, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of aspects which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it must be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it established 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 present dominance of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

But offered how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm unsure how long I can remain confident that my significantly writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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