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

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a couple of simple prompts about me provided by my buddy Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit recurring, and very verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collating information about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

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

When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, considering that rotating from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in anybody's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, created by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr that the product is planned as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wants to broaden his variety, producing various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI -generated items to human clients.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, wiki.vifm.info definitely in some parts, sound just like me.

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are talking about information here, we really suggest human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is pictures. It's masterpieces. 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 tune including 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 even though the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe the use of generative AI for creative purposes need to be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without authorization need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really powerful but let's develop it fairly and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese rivals 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 picked to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to use developers' content on the internet to help establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

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

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also strongly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is weakening one of its best performing industries on the vague promise of growth."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely positive we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them accredit their content, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a national information library consisting of public information from a vast array of sources will also be offered to AI researchers.

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 aimed to enhance the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share information of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has actually now been repealed 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 especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the web without their authorization, accc.rcec.sinica.edu.tw 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 variety of aspects which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training information and whether it must be paying for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the many downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for a fraction of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still need 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 mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.

But provided how quickly the tech is developing, I'm unsure how long I can stay confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are much better.

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