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

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

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a couple of basic triggers about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty design of writing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collecting data about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of business online offering AI-book composing 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 customised books, asteroidsathome.net generally 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 costs ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to generate 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 developed it, can any more copies.

There is presently no barrier to anyone creating one in anyone's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He wants to expand his variety, creating different genres such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's likewise a bit scary if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, definitely 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 produce comparable content based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are discussing information here, we really suggest human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. It's works of art. 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 tune 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 not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for innovative purposes ought to be prohibited, but I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without permission must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely powerful but let's construct it ethically and fairly."

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 industry and damages America's swagger

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

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to utilize creators' content on the web to assist develop their models, unless the rights holders decide out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He points out that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

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

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise highly versus getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is weakening one of its finest performing industries on the vague promise of development."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made till we are absolutely confident we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them accredit their material, access to premium material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a national data library consisting of public data from a wide variety of sources will also be made readily available to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

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

They claim 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 usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can constitute reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training information and whether it should be paying for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous week. It became one of the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it developed its innovation for a portion of the rate of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually desire 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 larger tasks. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, grandtribunal.org and it can be quite tough to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But given how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure for how long I can stay confident that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the biggest developments in global innovation, with analysis from BBC reporters around the globe.

Outside the UK? Register here.