For Christmas I got an intriguing present from a friend - 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 reviews.

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

It's an intriguing read, and really amusing in parts. But it also meanders rather a lot, and bphomesteading.com is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of composing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and really verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's triggers in collecting information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly 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 called the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly 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 expenses ₤ 26. The firm utilizes its own AI tools to produce them, based on an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in anyone's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, created by AI, forum.batman.gainedge.org and designed "entirely to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He hopes to expand his variety, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, certainly 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 similar material based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we really mean human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is pictures. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to find out how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks 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 attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe the use of generative AI for creative functions need to be prohibited, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without permission need to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really powerful but let's develop it ethically 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 market and dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have picked to block AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have actually decided to team up - the Financial Times has with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI designers to use developers' material on the web to help develop their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

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 ruining the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your house of Lords, is also highly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and an entire lot of happiness," states the Baroness, who is likewise an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

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

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made till we are definitely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them license their content, access to top quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a national data library including public data from a vast array of sources will likewise be offered to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 boost the safety of AI with, to name a few things, wiki.die-karte-bitte.de firms in the sector needed to share information of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of suits against AI companies, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the web without their permission, sitiosecuador.com and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can constitute fair use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it must be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It became the many downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it established its technology for a fraction of the price of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the minute, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has lots of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

But given how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure how long I can stay confident that my substantially slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

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

Outside the UK? Register here.