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For Christmas I received an interesting present from a good friend - my extremely own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was totally written by AI, wiki-tb-service.com with a few easy prompts about me supplied by my buddy Janet.

It's an interesting read, and uproarious 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, but it's also a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's triggers in collecting data about me.

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

There's likewise a mystical, repeated 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 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 informed me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, because 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 produce them, based upon an open source big language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody developing one in anyone's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is intended as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He wants to expand his range, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI-generated items to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound just like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we really indicate 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 short articles, this is photos. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to learn how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a tune featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists 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 granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for innovative purposes ought to be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without permission should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective however let's build it ethically and relatively."

OpenAI says Chinese competitors utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

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

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually picked to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have actually decided to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to use developers' content on the internet to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He points out that AI can make advances in areas 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 messing up the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, scientific-programs.science a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is also strongly against eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and an entire lot of pleasure," states the Baroness, who is likewise 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 vague promise of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made up until we are absolutely positive we have a practical strategy 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 designs in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide information library including public data from a vast array of sources will likewise be to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 intended to increase the safety of AI with, amongst other things, companies 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 reversed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less guideline.

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

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the web without their authorization, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of factors which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it must be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It became the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its innovation for a portion 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.

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It is complete of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm not sure the length of time I can stay confident that my significantly slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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