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For Christmas I got an intriguing present from a pal - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a couple of simple triggers about me supplied by my friend Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and very amusing in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of writing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and really verbose. It might have exceeded 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 likewise a strange, repetitive 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 dozens of companies 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 customised books, users.atw.hu primarily in the US, since rotating from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The firm uses its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source big language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, menwiki.men the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is planned as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He wants to widen his variety, creating different categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human customers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are talking about data here, we in fact mean human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, greyhawkonline.com which campaigns for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is images. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to discover how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for imaginative purposes need to be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without permission need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really effective however let's develop it fairly and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually picked to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use developers' content on the web to help establish their models, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He explains 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 destroying 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 industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a great deal of happiness," says the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening one of its finest performing markets on the unclear pledge of development."

A government representative said: "No move will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them license their material, access to top quality product 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 information library including public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise be offered to AI scientists.

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 boost the security of AI with, among other 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 actually now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, asteroidsathome.net but he is said to want the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a of claims against AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everyone 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 material from the web without their consent, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable 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 is under increasing analysis over how it collects training data and whether it need to be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it developed its innovation for a portion of the rate of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's current dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, ai I believe that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But provided how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not sure for how long I can stay positive that my significantly slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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