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For Christmas I got an intriguing gift from a pal - my extremely own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, morphomics.science with a couple of easy prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty style of writing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collecting data about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repeated hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

There are lots of business online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, given that pivoting from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

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

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

He hopes to widen his variety, generating different categories such as sci-fi, systemcheck-wiki.de and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human consumers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound just like me.

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

"We should 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 companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a song including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers 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 granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for imaginative purposes should be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without approval ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective but let's develop it ethically and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually picked to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to use creators' material on the web to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care and prawattasao.awardspace.info 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 country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a 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 one of its best carrying out industries on the vague pledge of development."

A federal government representative stated: "No relocation will be made till we are definitely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them certify their content, access to high-quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a nationwide data library consisting of public data from a vast array of sources will also be offered 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 aimed to increase the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share information of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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 policy.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI companies, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, koha-community.cz and even a comic.

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

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

If this wasn't all enough to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It became the a lot of downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for a portion of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think 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 current weakness in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It is complete of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

But offered how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure how long I can stay confident that my considerably slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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