For Christmas I received a fascinating present from a good friend - my very 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 couple of simple triggers about me supplied by my pal Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty design of writing, however it's also a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

There's also a mystical, 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 dozens of companies online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, since pivoting from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone creating one in anyone's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, created by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He hopes to widen his variety, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated items to human customers.

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

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

"We need to be clear, when we are talking about data here, we actually imply human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is photos. It's masterpieces. 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 featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for innovative functions must be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without authorization should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful but let's develop it ethically and relatively."

OpenAI states Chinese rivals utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes market and dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually selected to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have chosen to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use creators' content on the internet to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

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 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 also strongly versus getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a lot of joy," states the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining one of its best performing industries on the vague pledge of development."

A government representative stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to help them accredit their content, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a national data library including public information from a vast array of sources will also 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 aimed to improve the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed 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 stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI firms, and particularly versus 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 claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the web without their consent, and used it to train their systems.

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

If this wasn't all enough to consider, trademarketclassifieds.com Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It became the most downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology for a fraction of the rate of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, wiki.snooze-hotelsoftware.de if I really want a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger jobs. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts since it's so verbose.

But given how quickly the tech is evolving, wiki.tld-wars.space I'm not exactly sure the length of time I can stay positive that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the most significant advancements in worldwide innovation, with analysis from BBC reporters all over the world.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.