For Christmas I received an interesting present from a buddy - my really own "very popular" book.

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

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

It's an intriguing read, iwatex.com and very amusing in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It simulates my chatty design of writing, however it's likewise a bit repeated, and very verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.

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

There's likewise a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (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 writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, primarily 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 produce them, based upon an open source large language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, created by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He hopes to widen his variety, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human clients.

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 create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We ought to be clear, when we are discussing information here, we actually indicate human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, 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 tune including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists 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 choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still .

"I do not think using 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 ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective however let's construct it ethically and fairly."

OpenAI says Chinese competitors using 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 actually picked to block AI designers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have actually decided to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to utilize creators' material on the internet to assist develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

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

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

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also highly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is undermining among its finest performing industries on the unclear promise of development."

A government representative said: "No relocation will be made until we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them certify their material, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a national data library containing public data from a wide variety of sources will likewise be made offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules to control AI is now up in the air following President Trump's return 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 required to share information of the operations 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 instead, however he is stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

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

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of factors which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and genbecle.com whether it need to be paying for it.

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

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

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the moment, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather challenging to check out in parts since it's so verbose.

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

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the biggest advancements in worldwide innovation, with analysis from BBC correspondents around the world.

Outside the UK? Register here.