For Christmas I received an intriguing gift from a pal - my really own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a couple of simple triggers about me provided by my buddy Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty design of composing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collating information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repetitive hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

There are lots of companies 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 informed me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, thatswhathappened.wiki primarily in the US, considering that 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 utilizes its own AI tools to create 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 created it, can order any more copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in anybody's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and designed "entirely to bring humour and delight".

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

He hopes to widen his variety, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human customers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We must be clear, when we are talking about information here, we actually imply human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is images. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a tune featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms since it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for creative purposes should be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without approval need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's build it ethically and relatively."

OpenAI states 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 dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have selected to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually decided to collaborate - 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 allow AI designers to utilize developers' content on the web to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care 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 incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is also strongly versus getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and an entire lot of pleasure," states the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining among its best carrying out markets on the vague promise of growth."

A federal government representative stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are definitely positive we have a useful strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for right holders to assist them accredit their content, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide information library including public data from a wide variety of sources will likewise 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 return to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to enhance the safety of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share information of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is stated to want the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a number of claims against AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everybody from the New York 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 authorization, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" 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 scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it ought to be spending for it.

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

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology for a portion of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's current of the sector.

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I actually 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 bigger projects. It is complete of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

But given how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not sure the length of time I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the biggest advancements in worldwide technology, with analysis from BBC correspondents all over the world.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.