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

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a few simple triggers about me supplied by my buddy Janet.

It's a fascinating read, and uproarious in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of writing, however it's also a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's also a strange, repetitive 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 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 offered around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, because pivoting 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 generate them, based upon an open source large language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in anybody's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, produced by AI, and designed "entirely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the item is intended as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He hopes to broaden his variety, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it most likely 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 comparable content based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are discussing data here, we actually suggest human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

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

In 2023 a tune featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks 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 although the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for creative functions must be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without approval should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's construct it ethically and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have chosen to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He points out that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare 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 country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and an entire lot of pleasure," says the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining one of its finest carrying out markets on the vague promise of development."

A government representative said: "No move will be made till we are definitely confident we have a practical strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for right holders to help them license their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide data library including public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal rules to manage 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 security of AI with, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr amongst other things, companies in the sector required to share details of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of suits against AI firms, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everyone from the New York 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 consent, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of elements which can constitute fair use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects training data and whether it need to be paying for wiki.whenparked.com it.

If this wasn't all adequate to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the a lot of downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it established its technology for a portion of the rate of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It is complete of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts since it's so verbose.

But given how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm uncertain for how long I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, forum.batman.gainedge.org are much better.

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