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For Christmas I got an interesting gift from a pal - my really 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 few basic triggers about me provided by my good friend Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty style of writing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and really verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collating information about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of business online offering AI-book composing 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, mainly in the US, because pivoting from putting together AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The firm uses 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 - only Janet, who developed it, can buy any more copies.

There is currently no barrier to anybody developing one in anyone's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, created by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He intends to widen his range, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human clients.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, certainly 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 churn out similar content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we really suggest human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's works of art. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to discover how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a tune featuring AI -generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media 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 creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for imaginative purposes should be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without authorization should be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective however let's develop it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually picked to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have chosen to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to utilize creators' content on the internet to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

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

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and destroying the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is also highly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is undermining among its finest carrying out markets on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them license 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 plan, a national data library including public data from a vast array of sources will likewise be made offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules to control 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 improve the security of AI with, among other things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the 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 regulation.

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

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their approval, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of factors which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training data and whether it should be paying for it.

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

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

When it comes to me and opentx.cz a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually want 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 larger projects. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure how long I can remain confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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