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

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a few basic prompts about me provided by my friend Janet.

It's a fascinating read, and really funny 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 composing, however it's also a bit repeated, and really verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in looking at information 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 form of my feline (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 writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the chief executive 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 uses 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 - just Janet, who developed it, can buy any additional copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone producing one in any person's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is meant as a "customised gag gift", utahsyardsale.com and the books do not get offered even more.

He intends to widen his range, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - offering AI -generated products to human customers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to 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 need to be clear, when we are talking about information here, we actually imply human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. 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 tune including AI -generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and utahsyardsale.com 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 despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still .

"I do not think using generative AI for innovative purposes should be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without approval must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really powerful however let's build it fairly and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually selected to block AI designers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator 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 internet to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

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

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is likewise highly versus removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of pleasure," 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 guarantee of development."

A government spokesperson said: "No move will be made till we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to assist them license their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide data library containing public information from a large variety of sources will also be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to manage AI is now up in the air following President Trump's return 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 needed to share details of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.

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

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI companies, and particularly against 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 comic.

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

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of aspects which can make up fair usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector it-viking.ch is under increasing analysis over how it collects training data and whether it must be paying for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it established its technology for a fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I actually 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 projects. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But offered how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure how long I can remain confident that my considerably slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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