For Christmas I got an intriguing present from a buddy - my very own "very popular" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent title) bears my name and my photo on its cover, and it has radiant evaluations.

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a few basic prompts about me supplied by my pal Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty design of writing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's triggers in looking at data about me.

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

There's likewise a mystical, repeated hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on nearly 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 called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, given that pivoting from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to produce 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 produced it, can buy any more copies.

There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in anybody's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, developed by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered further.

He hopes to broaden his range, generating different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI-generated products to human clients.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound much like me.

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

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

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. It's artworks. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to learn 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 due to the fact that it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer attempting to choose it for annunciogratis.net a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for creative functions must be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without consent must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective however let's build it fairly and relatively."

OpenAI states 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 - consisting of the BBC - have chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to team up - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use creators' material on the web to help develop their models, unless the rights holders opt out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

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

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

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and an entire lot of joy," says the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening one of its best performing markets on the vague guarantee of growth."

A government representative stated: "No move will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them license their material, access to premium material 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 national data library containing public information from a wide variety of sources will also be offered to AI researchers.

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 aimed to improve the security of AI with, oke.zone amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has actually now been repealed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is said to desire the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a number of claims versus AI companies, and especially against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their consent, 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 number of factors which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector setiathome.berkeley.edu is under increasing analysis over how it collects training information and whether it should be paying for it.

If this wasn't all enough to contemplate, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the a lot of downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

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

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger tasks. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to check out in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But provided how quickly the tech is developing, I'm uncertain how long I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and modifying abilities, are much better.

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

Outside the UK? Sign up here.