For Christmas I received an interesting present from a friend - my extremely own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a few simple prompts about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

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

It mimics my chatty design of composing, but it's also a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repeated 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 dozens of companies online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, historydb.date 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 create them, based upon an open source big language design.

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

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

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is intended as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered even more.

He hopes to broaden his variety, creating various genres 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 items to human customers.

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

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar material based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are discussing data here, we in fact mean human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is images. It's works of art. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a song including 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 granted it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

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

OpenAI says Chinese rivals 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 chosen to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have decided to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He explains 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 messing up the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a whole lot of joy," says the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining among its best performing industries on the unclear promise of development."

A government representative said: "No relocation will be made till we are definitely positive we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them certify their material, access to high-quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI developers."

Under the UK federal government's new AI plan, a nationwide data library containing public data from a large range of sources will also be provided to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to manage 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 improve the security of AI with, amongst other things, firms in the sector needed to share information of the operations of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI firms, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten 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 material from the web without their approval, and utilized it to train their systems.

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

If this wasn't all adequate to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It became the a lot of downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology for a portion of the price 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 believe 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 weak point in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It is complete of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure how long I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the most significant developments in worldwide innovation, with analysis from BBC reporters worldwide.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.