For Christmas I got an intriguing present from a friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a few easy prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

It's an interesting read, asteroidsathome.net and very amusing in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of composing, menwiki.men but it's also a bit repetitive, and very 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 mystical, repetitive hallucination in the type 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 business online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, since pivoting from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The firm utilizes its own AI tools to create them, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr based on an open source large language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, created by AI, and developed "entirely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is meant as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get offered further.

He intends to broaden his range, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and possibly using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human customers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, it-viking.ch sound much like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors 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 need to be clear, when we are talking about information here, we in fact imply human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is pictures. It's artworks. 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 tune featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers 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 creator attempting to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, accc.rcec.sinica.edu.tw it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for imaginative purposes should be banned, however I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without authorization ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very effective but let's construct it fairly and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese rivals utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and damages America's swagger

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

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to utilize developers' material on the internet to help establish their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He mentions 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 incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

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

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

"The government is undermining one of its finest performing markets on the vague promise of growth."

A government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made till we are definitely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them certify their content, access to premium material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI plan, a nationwide information public data from a vast array of sources will likewise 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 return to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to increase the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share details of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a number of suits versus AI firms, and particularly 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 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 business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of elements which can constitute reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training data and whether it need to be paying for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to ponder, Chinese AI company 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 fraction of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It has lots of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

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

Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the greatest advancements in worldwide technology, with analysis from BBC reporters worldwide.

Outside the UK? Register here.