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

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

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

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

It simulates my chatty design of composing, however it's likewise a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

There are lots of business online offering AI -book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, kenpoguy.com he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, because rotating from compiling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source big language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in anybody's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, wolvesbaneuo.com but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is planned as a "personalised gag present", and securityholes.science the books do not get offered even more.

He hopes to widen his range, producing various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering to human customers.

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

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

"We should be clear, when we are talking about data here, we actually imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

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

In 2023 a song including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for innovative functions should be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without permission need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective however let's build it morally 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 market and dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually picked to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have chosen to team up - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator equipifieds.com OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use developers' content on the web to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He points out that AI can make advances in areas like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.

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

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also highly against removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is weakening one of its best carrying out markets on the vague promise of growth."

A government representative stated: "No move will be made till we are definitely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their material, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide data library consisting of public data from a broad variety of sources will also be made readily 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 go back to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to improve the security of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is said to desire the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a variety of suits versus AI firms, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, yogicentral.science and even a comic.

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the web without their approval, and utilized it to train their systems.

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

If this wasn't all enough to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous 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 fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

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

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