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

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

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a couple of basic prompts about me provided by my pal Janet.

It's a fascinating read, and uproarious 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 likewise a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's triggers in looking at information about me.

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

There's also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of companies online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, because rotating from assembling 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 generate them, based upon an open source big language design.

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

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

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is intended as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He intends to widen his range, producing different genres such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI-generated products to human clients.

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

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have actually expressed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable material based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are speaking about data here, we in fact suggest human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is pictures. It's works of art. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to find out how to do something and after that 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 since it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's creator trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

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

OpenAI says Chinese competitors 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 actually selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have decided to team up - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use creators' content on the internet to help establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "madness".

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

"All of these things work without going and changing 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 also strongly versus removing copyright law for AI.

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

"The government is undermining among its finest performing industries on the unclear pledge of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made till we are definitely confident we have a useful strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their material, access to premium product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a data library containing public information from a wide variety of sources will likewise be provided to AI researchers.

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 aimed to increase the safety of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector needed to share information of the functions of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their approval, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of elements which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing analysis over how it gathers training data and whether it need to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the previous 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 raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's present dominance of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has lots of mistakes and wikitravel.org hallucinations, and it can be rather tough to check out in parts since it's so verbose.

But provided how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not exactly sure how long I can stay positive that my considerably slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the greatest developments in international technology, with analysis from BBC correspondents worldwide.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.