For Christmas I received an intriguing gift from a good friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

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

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

It simulates my chatty style of writing, however it's likewise a bit recurring, larsaluarna.se and extremely verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, higgledy-piggledy.xyz repetitive hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no pets). 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 chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, given that pivoting from assembling 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 produce them, based upon an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in anybody's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, created by AI, and designed "solely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get offered further.

He wishes to widen his range, grandtribunal.org generating different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound just like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are discussing data here, we actually imply human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is photos. 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 singers 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 consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not think the usage of generative AI for creative purposes ought to be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without approval need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective however let's construct it fairly and relatively."

OpenAI states Chinese rivals 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 - including the BBC - have actually chosen to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have chosen to team up - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to utilize creators' content on the web to help establish their models, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex describes 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 changing copyright law and ruining the incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The government is weakening among its best performing industries on the unclear guarantee of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made up until we are absolutely positive we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to assist them accredit their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI strategy, a national data library including public information from a wide variety of sources will also be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 enhance the safety of AI with, among other things, firms in the sector required to share details of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

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

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their consent, and utilized 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 number 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 consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the many downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it established its innovation for a portion of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, for Dummies highlights the existing weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts since it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure for how long I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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

Outside the UK? Sign up here.