For Christmas I received a fascinating gift from a good friend - my really own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was by AI, with a couple of basic prompts about me provided by my good friend Janet.

It's an interesting 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 design of writing, however it's also a bit repeated, and very verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's prompts in collecting data about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repeated hallucination in the form of my feline (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 primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, given that pivoting from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to create them, based upon an open source large language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in any person's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, created by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is meant as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.

He wishes to broaden his range, generating various genres such as sci-fi, accc.rcec.sinica.edu.tw and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human clients.

It's likewise a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely took less than a minute to generate, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We must be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we actually mean human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to discover 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 media before being pulled from streaming platforms since 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 even though the artists were phony, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not believe the usage of generative AI for innovative functions should be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without approval should be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really powerful however let's build it morally and relatively."

OpenAI says 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 dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually picked to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training functions. Others have chosen to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and destroying the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also strongly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.

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

"The federal government is undermining one of its best performing industries on the vague pledge of growth."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No relocation will be made up until we are absolutely positive we have a useful plan that provides each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to help them certify their material, access to top quality material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a national information library including public data from a broad variety of sources will likewise be made available to AI researchers.

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 increase the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share information of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of suits 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 comic.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the web without their authorization, garagesale.es and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a number of aspects which can constitute fair usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training data and whether it must be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to consider, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its technology for a portion of the rate of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's current dominance of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the moment, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still have 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 errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to check out in parts because it's so verbose.

But offered how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not sure for how long I can remain confident that my substantially slower human writing and wavedream.wiki editing abilities, are better.

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the most significant developments in global innovation, with analysis from BBC correspondents all over the world.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.