For Christmas I received a fascinating gift from a pal - my extremely own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a few basic triggers about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and extremely funny in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is someplace in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of composing, but it's likewise a bit repeated, and pipewiki.org extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repeated 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 business 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 told me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, considering that pivoting from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

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

I'm not asking you to buy my book. Actually you can't - only Janet, who developed it, can any further copies.

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

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

He wishes to broaden his variety, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human clients.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

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

"This is books, this is 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 then do more like that."

In 2023 a song including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for clashofcryptos.trade a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for innovative functions need to be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without authorization need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful but let's build it ethically and fairly."

OpenAI says Chinese rivals using 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 chosen to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have actually decided to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would permit AI developers to use creators' material on the internet to assist develop their models, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He mentions that AI can make advances in areas like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and messing up the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The federal government is weakening among its finest carrying out markets on the unclear promise of growth."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are absolutely confident we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them license their content, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a national information library including public data from a vast array of sources will also be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules to manage AI is now up in the air following President Trump's go back to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to enhance the security of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has actually now been rescinded by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their permission, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of elements 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 adequate to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has 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 fraction of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I think 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 current weakness in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

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

Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the most significant developments in worldwide innovation, with analysis from BBC reporters worldwide.

Outside the UK? Register here.