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

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

Yet it was entirely written 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 likewise meanders rather a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of writing, however it's also a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's triggers in collecting data about me.

Several sentences begin "as a leading innovation journalist ..." - cringe - which might 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 dozens of business 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 informed me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, because pivoting from compiling 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 produce them, based upon an open source large language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in any person's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is meant as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get offered further.

He hopes to broaden his variety, generating various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI -generated items to human customers.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound much like me.

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are talking about information here, we actually mean human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is images. 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 tune 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 creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for imaginative functions need to be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without consent should be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful however let's construct it morally and relatively."

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

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to use creators' material on the web to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists 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 house of Lords, is also highly versus getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

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

A federal government representative stated: "No relocation will be made till we are definitely positive we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to help them certify their content, access to premium product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a national information library containing public data from a large variety of sources will also be made offered 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 improve the safety of AI with, among other things, firms 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 rather, but he is said to want the AI sector to deal with less policy.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the web without their consent, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can constitute fair use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training data and whether it need to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It became the many downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its innovation for a fraction of the rate of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

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

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