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

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a couple of basic prompts about me provided by my good friend Janet.

It's an interesting 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 simulates my chatty style of composing, but it's also a bit recurring, and extremely verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collating data about me.

Several sentences begin "as a leading technology journalist ..." - 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 pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly 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 got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, considering that pivoting from assembling 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 generate them, based on an open source large language model.

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

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

Legally, king-wifi.win 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 sold even more.

He hopes to expand his range, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI-generated items to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for hb9lc.org a living. Not least due to the fact that 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 similar material based upon it.

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

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to discover 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 networks before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for innovative purposes should be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without approval should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really effective however let's develop it morally and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have selected to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have decided to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to utilize creators' content on the web to help establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He explains that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

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

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

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of pleasure," says the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening one of its finest carrying out markets on the vague guarantee of development."

A government representative stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a practical plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their material, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a national information library containing public data from a wide range of sources will also 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 aimed to increase the security of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector required to share information of the operations 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, however he is stated to want the AI sector to face less guideline.

This comes as a number of lawsuits against AI firms, and especially versus 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 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 "reasonable use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can constitute reasonable 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 ought to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It became the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its technology for a portion of the rate of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns 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 really want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But given how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain for how long I can stay confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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