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

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (fantastic title) bears my name and my image on its cover, and securityholes.science it has radiant evaluations.

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a few simple prompts about me supplied by my good friend 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 simulates my chatty style of writing, disgaeawiki.info but it's also a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's triggers in collecting data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on almost 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 called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, given that rotating from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to 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 created it, can purchase any more copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anyone's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and created "solely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He intends to broaden his variety, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human clients.

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

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

"We need to be clear, when we are talking about information here, we really mean human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. 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 including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media 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 attempting to choose it for vetlek.ru a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for creative purposes need to be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without authorization need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely powerful but let's build it morally and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have chosen to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have chosen to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for online-learning-initiative.org instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to use creators' content on the web to help 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, journalists and artists.

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and destroying the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is likewise strongly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is weakening one of its finest carrying out markets on the unclear promise of development."

A government representative said: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely positive we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to assist them accredit their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a national data library containing public data from a wide variety of sources will likewise be made readily available to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal rules to control 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 improve the safety of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been repealed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less regulation.

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

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their authorization, 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 number of aspects which can constitute reasonable 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 ought to be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it developed its innovation for a fraction of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I really want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It is complete of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is developing, I'm not sure for how long I can remain positive that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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