For Christmas I received an interesting present from a good friend - my extremely own "best-selling" book.

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

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

It's a fascinating read, and uproarious in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, and is somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It imitates my chatty style of writing, however it's likewise a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating information about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly 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 offered around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, because 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 utilizes its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source big language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anyone's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, produced by AI, and created "entirely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is planned as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered further.

He intends to expand his range, generating various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - offering AI-generated items to human customers.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

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

"We should be clear, when we are discussing information here, we actually suggest human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is articles, this is photos. It's artworks. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to learn 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 media 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 trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for innovative functions must be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without approval must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be very powerful however let's develop it ethically and relatively."

OpenAI says Chinese rivals utilizing its work for trademarketclassifieds.com their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

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

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

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

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

He explains 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 incomes of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth creators, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of happiness," says the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is weakening one of its finest carrying out industries on the vague pledge of growth."

A federal government spokesperson stated: "No move will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a practical strategy that delivers each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them certify their content, access to premium product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for right holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI strategy, a nationwide information library containing public information from a large range of sources will also be offered 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 intended to increase the security of AI with, to name a few things, companies in the sector required to share information of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

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

This comes as a variety of claims against AI companies, and wiki.vifm.info especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been secured by everybody from the New York 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 web without their approval, 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 number 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 information and whether it must be spending for it.

If this wasn't all enough to contemplate, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the many downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it established its innovation for a fraction of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

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

But offered how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure how long I can remain confident that my significantly slower human writing and modifying skills, are much better.

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

Outside the UK? Register here.