For Christmas I got a fascinating gift from a buddy - my very own "very popular" book.

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

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

It's an interesting read, and uproarious in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

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

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

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

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

When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, historydb.date based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, because pivoting from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The firm utilizes its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source big language design.

I'm not asking you to buy my book. Actually you can't - just Janet, who developed it, can purchase any additional copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone producing one in any person's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

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

He intends to expand his range, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to create, 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 utilized to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable content based upon it.

"We ought to be clear, when we are talking about information here, we actually imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is images. It's works of art. 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 tune including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for creative functions need to be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without consent should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really powerful however let's develop it fairly and relatively."

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 market and dents America's swagger

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

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to material on the internet to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations 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 country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is likewise strongly versus 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 annunciogratis.net Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening one of its finest performing markets on the vague pledge of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made up until we are definitely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for right holders to assist them accredit their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a national information library including public data from a large range of sources will also be made readily available to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to control 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 boost the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is said to want the AI sector to deal with less policy.

This comes as a number of suits against AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

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

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of elements which can constitute reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it collects 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 previous week. It became one of the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its technology 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 present supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still have to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of inaccuracies and coastalplainplants.org hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to read in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But offered how quickly the tech is developing, I'm unsure the length of time I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and modifying skills, are better.

Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the biggest developments in worldwide innovation, with analysis from BBC correspondents around the globe.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.