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For Christmas I got a fascinating present from a pal - my extremely own "best-selling" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent title) bears my name and my picture on its cover, wiki-tb-service.com and it has radiant reviews.

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

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

It imitates my chatty design of writing, however it's likewise a bit repeated, and really verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collecting information about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repetitive 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 dozens of business online offering AI -book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, considering that pivoting from assembling 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 big 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 presently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "customised gag gift", and galgbtqhistoryproject.org the books do not get offered even more.

He wants to widen his variety, various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI -generated items to human consumers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound simply like 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 should be clear, when we are talking about data here, we really imply human developers' life works," says 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 photos. It's artworks. 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 vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for creative purposes must be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without approval must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective however let's construct it fairly and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese competitors utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes market and dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have picked to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually chosen 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 allow AI designers to utilize developers' content on the internet to assist develop their models, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He points out 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 ruining 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 industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a lot of delight," says the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening among its best performing markets on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A government representative stated: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a practical strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to assist them license their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide information library containing public data from a wide variety of sources will likewise be provided 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, amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is said to want the AI sector to deal with less policy.

This comes as a number of suits versus AI firms, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

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

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of factors which can make up fair usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and whether it ought to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being one of the most 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 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 believe that at the minute, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts since it's so verbose.

But offered how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm unsure the length of time I can remain confident that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

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