For Christmas I got a fascinating present from a good friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a few simple triggers about me provided by my good friend Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and 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 imitates my chatty style of writing, however it's likewise a bit recurring, and extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a strange, repetitive hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of companies 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 informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, bphomesteading.com primarily in the US, given that pivoting from putting together 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 create them, based upon an open source big language model.

I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - only Janet, who developed it, can order any further copies.

There is presently no barrier to anyone producing one in anybody's name, including celebs - although Mr says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and wiki.insidertoday.org created "solely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He hopes to expand his variety, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - selling AI-generated items to human clients.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have actually revealed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we in fact imply human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a tune including 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 actually not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for creative functions must be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without approval must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely powerful but let's develop it fairly and relatively."

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

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to utilize creators' material on the internet to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He explains that AI can make advances in locations 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 the House of Lords, is also strongly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of happiness," says the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening among its best carrying out markets on the unclear guarantee of development."

A government representative said: "No move will be made till we are definitely positive we have a practical plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them license their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, forum.batman.gainedge.org a nationwide data library containing public data from a wide variety of sources will also be provided to AI scientists.

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 boost the security of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a number of lawsuits versus AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their consent, drapia.org and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of factors which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training data and whether it ought to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

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

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for addsub.wiki Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts due to the fact that 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 significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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