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For Christmas I got an intriguing gift from a 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 radiant reviews.

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a few simple triggers about me provided by my friend Janet.

It's an interesting read, and really amusing in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It simulates my chatty design of writing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

Several sentences start "as a leading technology 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 family pets). 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 primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, primarily 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 create them, based upon an open source large language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody producing one in anyone's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, created by AI, and designed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is meant as a "customised gag gift", photorum.eclat-mauve.fr and galgbtqhistoryproject.org the books do not get sold even more.

He hopes to expand his variety, producing various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI -generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, wiki.piratenpartei.de you compose for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to generate, annunciogratis.net and it does, definitely in some parts, akropolistravel.com sound just like me.

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

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

"This is books, this is posts, this is pictures. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to learn how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song featuring AI -generated voices of Canadian singers 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 granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for creative purposes need to be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without permission must be banned," Mr adds. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's construct it ethically 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 content for training purposes. Others have decided to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

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 messing up the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is also highly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of joy," states the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening one of its finest performing industries on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A government representative said: "No move will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to help them license their content, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a nationwide data library containing public data from a broad range of sources will likewise be made readily 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 intended to boost the safety of AI with, among other things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

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

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their consent, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of factors which can make up 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 sufficient to contemplate, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It became one of the most downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

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

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It is complete of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts because it's so verbose.

But given how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm unsure the length of time I can remain positive that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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