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For Christmas I received an interesting gift from a friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a few basic prompts about me provided by my pal 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, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's triggers in looking at information about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the kind 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 companies 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 offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, since 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 generate them, based on an open source large language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody producing one in any person's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, wiki.insidertoday.org but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered further.

He wishes to broaden his variety, generating various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - selling AI -generated items to human consumers.

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 create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

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

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

"This is books, this is posts, this is images. 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 song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists 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 phony, it was still hugely popular.

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

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually selected to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have chosen to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for pyra-handheld.com instance.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to use developers' material on the web to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and .

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and destroying the incomes of the country'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 jobs and a lot of pleasure," says the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for gratisafhalen.be Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening among its best carrying out markets on the unclear pledge of growth."

A federal government representative said: "No move will be made until we are definitely positive we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to assist them license their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a national data library consisting of public data from a vast array of sources will also be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 aimed to enhance the safety of AI with, to name a few 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 reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is stated to want the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a number of suits versus AI companies, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the web without their authorization, 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 elements which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector online-learning-initiative.org is under increasing analysis over how it collects training information and whether it should be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology for a fraction of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and classihub.in threatens American's existing supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe 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 present weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It is complete of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and disgaeawiki.info it can be quite difficult to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But provided how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure for how long I can remain confident that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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