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

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a few simple prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

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

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

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

There's also a strange, repeated hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically 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 contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, considering that rotating from compiling AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in anybody's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, developed by AI, and designed "entirely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold even more.

He wants to broaden his range, producing various genres such as sci-fi, and possibly offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human consumers.

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

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

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

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. It's works of art. 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 tune including AI -generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for innovative purposes must be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without permission should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective but let's construct it fairly and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese competitors utilizing its work for their AI apps

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China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and damages America's swagger

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

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use developers' content on the web to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He explains that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and destroying the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also strongly versus removing copyright law for AI.

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

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

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them license their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a nationwide data library including public data from a large variety of sources will also be provided to AI researchers.

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 aimed to improve the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a number of lawsuits against AI firms, and especially 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 claim 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 "reasonable usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training information and whether it should be spending for it.

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

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

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, menwiki.men Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.

But provided how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not sure for how long I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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