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For Christmas I received an interesting gift from a good friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, yogaasanas.science with a few simple triggers about me provided by my buddy Janet.

It's a fascinating 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 simulates my chatty style of writing, however it's likewise a bit repeated, and really verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's likewise a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the form 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 business online offering AI -book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, because 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 generate 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 further copies.

There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in anybody's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is planned as a "customised gag present", and galgbtqhistoryproject.org the books do not get sold further.

He wishes to broaden his range, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI -generated products to human customers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound just 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 must be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we actually mean human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns 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 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 granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think the use of generative AI for imaginative functions must be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without consent ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really powerful but let's develop it ethically and fairly."

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China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually picked to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have decided 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 allow AI designers to utilize creators' material on the internet to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He points out 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 messing up the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The federal government is undermining one of its best performing markets on the unclear pledge of growth."

A federal government representative said: "No move will be made up until we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to assist them accredit their content, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a national data library containing public data from a broad variety of sources will also be offered 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 intended to enhance the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share details of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a number of suits versus AI companies, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everyone from the New York 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 web without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of factors which can make up fair usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training information and whether it must be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it established its technology for a fraction of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It is full of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But provided how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure for how long I can stay confident that my considerably slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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