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

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

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a couple of basic prompts about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

It's a fascinating read, and uproarious in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere between a self-help book and wiki.dulovic.tech a stream of anecdotes.

It imitates my chatty style of composing, however it's likewise a bit recurring, and very verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's likewise a mystical, repeated 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 got in touch with the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly 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 costs ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to produce them, based on an open source big language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in anybody's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, created by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He wants to expand his range, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and pipewiki.org maybe providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human clients.

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

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

"We must be clear, when we are discussing data here, we in fact indicate human creators' 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 images. 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 song including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

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

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually picked to obstruct AI designers 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 example.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He mentions 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 nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise strongly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of pleasure," says the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining among its finest carrying out markets on the unclear promise of growth."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide information library consisting of public information from a broad 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 boost the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share information of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a variety of lawsuits versus AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their permission, and pipewiki.org used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of aspects which can make up fair usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training data and whether it should be paying for it.

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

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

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It is complete of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.

But given how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not exactly sure how long I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

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