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

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (great 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 triggers about me provided by my good friend Janet.

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

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

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the kind of my cat (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 contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, 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 costs ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source large language model.

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

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

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is planned as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered even more.

He hopes to expand his variety, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI -generated goods to human consumers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are talking about data here, we in fact suggest human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to learn how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song featuring AI -generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms since 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 although the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for innovative purposes ought to be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without permission should be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective but let's develop it morally and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually selected to block AI designers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually decided to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI developers to utilize creators' content on the web to assist develop their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He points out that AI can make advances in areas like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and ruining the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also highly versus getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

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

A government spokesperson said: "No move will be made up until we are absolutely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to help them license their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a national data library containing public information from a large range of sources will also be made available to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 intended to improve the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is said to want the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a number of lawsuits against AI companies, and particularly 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 comedian.

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

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number 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 gathers training information and whether it need to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to contemplate, 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 developed its innovation for a portion of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It is full of inaccuracies and wolvesbaneuo.com hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.

But offered how quickly the tech is developing, I'm not sure for how long I can stay confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are much better.

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