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

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a few basic prompts about me provided by my good friend Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty style of writing, equipifieds.com but it's also a bit recurring, and extremely verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's triggers in collecting information about me.

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

There's also a mystical, vmeste-so-vsemi.ru repeated hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

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

When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, because pivoting from putting together 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 produce them, based on an open source big .

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anyone's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, developed by AI, morphomics.science and developed "exclusively to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is meant as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He wants to expand his variety, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human customers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound just 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 speaking about information here, we really mean human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's works of art. 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 tune featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers 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 granted 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 wildly popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for creative functions need to be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without consent must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective however let's build it fairly and fairly."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually picked to block AI designers from trawling their online material for speedrunwiki.com training functions. Others have chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations 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 destroying the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The government is weakening one of its finest carrying out industries on the vague pledge of growth."

A federal government representative said: "No relocation will be made up until we are absolutely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their material, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide information library consisting of public information from a broad variety of sources will also be made 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 aimed to improve the security of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector iuridictum.pecina.cz needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is stated to want the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the web without their permission, 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 number of elements which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training information and whether it ought to be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a portion of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to read in parts because it's so verbose.

But given how rapidly the tech is developing, parentingliteracy.com I'm not exactly sure for how long I can remain confident that my considerably slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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