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

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (terrific title) bears my name and my picture 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 friend Janet.

It's an interesting read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is someplace 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 might have surpassed Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly 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 got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, since 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 uses its own AI tools to produce them, based on an open source big language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone producing one in any person's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, developed by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He intends to expand his variety, producing various such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - selling AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it probably 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 utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar content based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we actually suggest human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. It's artworks. 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 featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe the use of generative AI for creative functions should be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without authorization should be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective but let's construct it ethically and fairly."

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 dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have picked to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have chosen to team up - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations like defence, healthcare 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 nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is likewise strongly against removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is undermining among its best performing markets on the vague pledge of growth."

A government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made up until we are absolutely confident we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for ideal holders to help them license their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a nationwide data library including public information from a vast array of sources will likewise be provided to AI scientists.

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 aimed to increase the security of AI with, among other things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a variety of lawsuits versus AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everyone from the New york city 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 approval, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of elements which can constitute fair use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training data and whether it should be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it established its technology for a portion of the rate of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and setiathome.berkeley.edu it can be rather difficult to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

But offered how quickly the tech is evolving, bio.rogstecnologia.com.br I'm uncertain how long I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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

Outside the UK? Sign up here.