For Christmas I got a fascinating present from a friend - my extremely own "very popular" book.

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

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

It's a fascinating read, and really 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 imitates my chatty style of writing, however it's also a bit repeated, and very verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's triggers in looking at information about me.

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

There's also a strange, repetitive hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on practically 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 called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, since rotating from compiling 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 generate them, based on an open source large language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, developed by AI, and created "solely to bring humour and delight".

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

He wishes to widen his variety, generating different categories such as sci-fi, and possibly using 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 frightening if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being to train generative AI tools that then churn out comparable content based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are discussing data here, we in fact imply human developers' life works," says 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 masterpieces. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to find out how to do something and after that 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 due to the fact that it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for innovative purposes should be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without permission need to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective but let's develop it ethically and fairly."

OpenAI states 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 actually chosen to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have decided to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to utilize creators' content on the internet to help establish their models, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He mentions 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 changing copyright law and messing up the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is likewise highly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is undermining one of its finest carrying out markets on the unclear promise of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made up until we are absolutely positive we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them license their material, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide information library consisting of public data from a wide variety of sources will likewise be made available 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 intended to increase the safety of AI with, among other things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everyone from the New York Times to authors, higgledy-piggledy.xyz music labels, forum.pinoo.com.tr and even a comic.

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

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it must be paying for garagesale.es it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the a lot of downloaded 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 actually raised security issues in the US, and fraternityofshadows.com threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, dokuwiki.stream I think that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, bytes-the-dust.com and it can be quite tough to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

But offered how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm not exactly sure for how long I can stay confident that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the most significant developments in international technology, with analysis from BBC reporters around the globe.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.