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For Christmas I got an intriguing present from a pal - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a few easy prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty style of composing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and extremely verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

There are lots of companies online offering AI -book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, because pivoting 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 produce them, based on an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in any person's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, created by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold even more.

He hopes to broaden his variety, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI -generated goods to human consumers.

It's also a bit terrifying 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 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 must be clear, when we are talking about information here, we actually imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is photos. It's masterpieces. 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 networks before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that 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 even though the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for creative purposes should be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without consent should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective but let's develop it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to use developers' content on the web to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He explains 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 changing copyright law and ruining the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is likewise strongly versus getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is undermining one of its best performing markets on the unclear pledge of growth."

A government representative stated: "No move will be made up until we are absolutely positive we have a practical strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them accredit their material, access to premium product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide information library consisting of public information from a large range of sources will likewise be made readily available to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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, companies in the sector required to share details of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has actually now been reversed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, thatswhathappened.wiki however he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a number of claims versus AI firms, and particularly versus 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 claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the web without their consent, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of elements which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination 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 one of the most downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

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

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has plenty 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 progressing, I'm not sure how long I can remain confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

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