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

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

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a few simple prompts about me provided by my good friend Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty design of writing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's triggers in looking at data about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on almost 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 informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, because pivoting from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He wants to broaden his range, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe offering an . It's designed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you write for oke.zone a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound simply like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being used 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 really indicate human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard developers' rights.

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

In 2023 a song 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 actually not granted 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 hugely popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for creative purposes ought to be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without approval must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective however let's build it fairly and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have decided to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI designers to use creators' material on the web to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He mentions 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 ruining the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of joy," states the Baroness, who is also a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening one of its best carrying out industries on the vague guarantee of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them certify their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a national information library containing public data from a vast array of sources will likewise be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to control 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, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share information of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are released.

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

This comes as a number of suits against AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their authorization, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it ought to be spending 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 the many downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its technology for a fraction of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, oke.zone 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 present weak point in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

But provided how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure the length of time I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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