For Christmas I received a fascinating gift from a pal - my extremely own "best-selling" book.

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

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

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

It mimics my chatty design of writing, however it's likewise a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in collecting data about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no pets). And rocksoff.org 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, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, since pivoting from assembling 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 generate them, based on an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in any person's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, created by AI, and created "solely to bring humour and happiness".

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

He wishes to broaden his range, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI-generated items to human clients.

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

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are talking about information here, we actually mean human developers' 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 photos. 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 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 consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for creative functions ought to be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without approval need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective however let's construct it morally and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually decided to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for annunciogratis.net instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to use developers' content on the web to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations 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 ruining the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The federal government is undermining among its best performing markets on the vague pledge of growth."

A government representative said: "No move will be made till we are absolutely positive we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them license their content, access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a nationwide data library including public information from a wide variety of sources will also be offered to AI researchers.

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 enhance the security of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of lawsuits versus AI companies, and particularly 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 claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the web without their consent, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore 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 examination over how it gathers training data and whether it should be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to contemplate, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being the many downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

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

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It is complete of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But offered how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure the length of time I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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