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

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

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

It's an interesting read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders rather a lot, utahsyardsale.com and is someplace in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It imitates my chatty style of writing, however it's likewise a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's triggers in collating data about me.

Several sentences begin "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 nearly 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 contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, since pivoting from putting together 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 - just Janet, who created it, can order any further copies.

There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in anyone's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, created by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is planned as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He intends to broaden his range, producing different categories such as sci-fi, and cadizpedia.wikanda.es maybe using an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, systemcheck-wiki.de certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We must be clear, when we are discussing information here, we in fact imply human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to learn 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 media before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that it was not their work and they had actually 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 extremely popular.

"I do not think the usage of generative AI for imaginative purposes ought to be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without permission ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very powerful however let's construct it fairly and relatively."

OpenAI says Chinese competitors utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

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

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

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to use creators' content on the web to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care and logistics without the work of authors, reporters and artists.

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and destroying the livelihoods of the country'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 an entire lot of joy," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining one of its best carrying out industries on the unclear guarantee of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a practical strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them accredit their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a national data library containing public data from a large range of sources will likewise be provided to AI researchers.

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 boost the safety of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is said to desire the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a number of lawsuits versus AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

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

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of elements which can make up fair use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training information and whether it need to be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it established its innovation 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 present supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to read in parts since it's so verbose.

But provided how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure how long I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying abilities, are much better.

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the greatest advancements in worldwide innovation, with analysis from BBC reporters around the globe.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.