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

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

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a couple of simple triggers about me provided by my friend Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit repetitive, wiki.vifm.info and extremely verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's triggers 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, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no family pets). 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 got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, since from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in anybody's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, produced by AI, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr and created "exclusively to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He wishes to expand his variety, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human consumers.

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

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

"We should be clear, when we are talking about information here, we actually imply human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect creators' 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 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 not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for innovative functions need to be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without approval ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful but let's develop it morally and relatively."

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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 functions. Others have decided to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI developers to use creators' material on the web to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He explains that AI can make advances in areas 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 ruining the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, disgaeawiki.info a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise highly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is undermining one of its finest carrying out industries on the vague guarantee of growth."

A government representative stated: "No relocation will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them certify their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide data library consisting of public data from a vast array of sources will also be made available 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 aimed to increase the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms 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 actually now been repealed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is stated to want the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a number of suits versus AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They claim that the AI companies 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 use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training data and grandtribunal.org whether it should be paying for it.

If this wasn't all enough to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It became one of the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it established its innovation for a portion of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I really want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It is complete of mistakes and hallucinations, and wikitravel.org it can be quite tough to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But offered how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm uncertain the length of time I can remain confident that my considerably slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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