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For Christmas I got an interesting present from a good friend - my extremely own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a few basic prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit repeated, lespoetesbizarres.free.fr and extremely verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collecting data about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on nearly 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 called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, given that rotating 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 produce them, based on 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 buy any further copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anybody's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

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

He wants to widen his range, producing various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human customers.

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 produce, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound much 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 need to be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we actually mean human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, macphersonwiki.mywikis.wiki which campaigns for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is pictures. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to learn 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 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 trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for imaginative functions should be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without permission need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really effective but let's construct it morally and relatively."

OpenAI says Chinese rivals utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and dents America's swagger

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

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use creators' content on the internet to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He mentions 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 ruining the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a whole lot of joy," says the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening one of its finest performing industries on the vague pledge of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to assist them certify their content, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide information library consisting of public information from a large range of sources will likewise be made offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules to manage 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 now been rescinded by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is said to desire the AI sector to face less guideline.

This comes as a number of suits versus AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the web without their authorization, and utilized 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 reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training data and whether it need to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all enough to contemplate, 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 its innovation for a fraction 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.

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly 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 has plenty of mistakes and fishtanklive.wiki hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts because it's so verbose.

But given how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not sure for how long I can remain confident that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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