For Christmas I received an interesting present from a buddy - 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 written by AI, with a few basic prompts about me supplied by my buddy Janet.

It's a fascinating read, and uproarious in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, and is someplace in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It imitates my chatty design of composing, but it's also a bit recurring, and really verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, 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 called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, considering that rotating from assembling 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 big language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody producing one in anybody's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

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

He intends to expand his variety, creating different genres such as sci-fi, and it-viking.ch perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human customers.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely 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 churn out comparable material based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we really imply human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is photos. It's works of art. 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 featuring AI-generated voices of 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 developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for creative functions need to be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without approval should be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very powerful but let's build it ethically and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use developers' material on the web to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex explains 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 incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also strongly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of joy," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening one of its best carrying out industries on the vague promise of development."

A government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made until we are definitely positive we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them accredit their material, access to premium product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide information library consisting of public data from a large range 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 go back to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to increase the safety of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share details of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It stays 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 number of claims versus AI firms, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

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

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

If this wasn't all adequate to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It became one of the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it established its innovation for a portion of the cost of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It is complete of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts since it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm uncertain for how long I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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