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

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a few simple prompts about me supplied by my pal Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty design of composing, but it's also a bit recurring, and very verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.

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

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

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

When I got in touch with the primary executive Adir Mashiach, bphomesteading.com based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, considering 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 firm utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source big language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anyone's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is meant as a "personalised gag present", oke.zone and the books do not get offered further.

He intends to expand his range, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated items to human customers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound much like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have actually expressed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar material based upon it.

"We ought to be clear, when we are discussing information here, we in fact indicate human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to regard creators' 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 find out how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe the use of generative AI for creative purposes should be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without permission ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really powerful however let's construct it ethically and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have actually decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations 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 ruining the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise highly against removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is weakening among its finest carrying out markets on the vague pledge of development."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them license their content, access to high-quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a nationwide information library containing public information from a large variety of sources will likewise be made readily available 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 enhance the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share information of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of claims against AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their permission, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of aspects 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 enough to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being the many downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

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

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But offered how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure how long I can stay confident that my significantly writing and modifying skills, are better.

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