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

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

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty design of writing, but it's likewise a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's triggers in collecting data about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, in the form of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of companies online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly 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 company utilizes its own AI tools to produce them, based upon an open source big language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody producing one in anyone's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, produced by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is meant as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He wants to broaden his variety, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human clients.

It's likewise a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound simply like me.

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

"We must be clear, when we are talking about data here, we really mean human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect creators' 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 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 since it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for imaginative functions must be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without consent must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's construct it morally and relatively."

OpenAI says 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 - including the BBC - have selected to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use creators' content on the internet to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

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

"All of these things work without going and altering 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 also strongly against removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of delight," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining one of its finest performing industries on the vague pledge of growth."

A federal government representative stated: "No move will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to help them license their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide data library consisting of public data from a large range of sources will likewise be provided to AI scientists.

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 aimed to improve the safety of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector required to share information of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

But this has now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do rather, but he is stated to desire the AI sector kenpoguy.com to deal with less policy.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits versus AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

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 business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of factors which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training data and whether it need to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded totally 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 threatens American's current dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I really want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for larger projects. It is full of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite challenging to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain the length of time I can remain positive that my significantly 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 correspondents all over the world.

Outside the UK? Register here.