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

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me supplied by my pal Janet.

It's an interesting read, and extremely amusing in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It imitates my chatty style of writing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and extremely verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's triggers in looking at data about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

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

When I got in touch with the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, since rotating 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 produce them, based upon an open source big language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and created "solely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He intends to expand oke.zone his variety, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human consumers.

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

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

"We should be clear, when we are talking about information here, we in fact mean human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms 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 song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for creative purposes should be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without authorization ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really powerful but let's build it morally and fairly."

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

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use creators' content on the internet to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He mentions 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 altering copyright law and destroying the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, genbecle.com a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also strongly against removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is weakening among its finest performing markets on the vague guarantee of growth."

A government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them accredit their content, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, kenpoguy.com a national data library containing public information from a wide variety of sources will also be provided to AI researchers.

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 safety of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector required to share details of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is said to want the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a number of suits against AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everyone from the New york city 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 web 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 number of factors which can constitute reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training information and whether it ought to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being the many downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it established its innovation for a portion of the rate of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has 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 think that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to read in parts since it's so verbose.

But provided how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain for how long I can remain confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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