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For Christmas I got a fascinating gift from a friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

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

It's an interesting read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders quite 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 recurring, and really verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

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

There's also a strange, 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 companies online offering AI-book writing 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 offered around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, because rotating from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to produce them, based upon an open source big language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in any person's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, created by AI, and designed "entirely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered further.

He wishes to expand his variety, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - selling AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to create, asteroidsathome.net and it does, definitely 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 produce similar content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we really indicate human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard creators' rights.

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

In 2023 a song featuring 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 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 making use of generative AI for creative purposes need to be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without authorization should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective but let's develop it ethically and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese competitors using 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 picked to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online material for training purposes. 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' content on the web to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations 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 against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and an entire lot of delight," says the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening among its finest performing industries on the vague promise of development."

A government spokesperson said: "No move will be made until we are definitely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them accredit their material, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a national information library containing public data from a wide variety of sources will also be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of 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 improve the security of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector required to share details of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI firms, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten 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 material from the internet without their consent, and forum.altaycoins.com used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of elements which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training information and whether it need to be paying for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for a fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and photorum.eclat-mauve.fr threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

As for me and wiki.snooze-hotelsoftware.de a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

But given how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm unsure for how long I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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