For Christmas I received a fascinating gift from a buddy - my very own "very popular" 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 written by AI, with a few easy prompts about me supplied by my friend Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty style of writing, however it's also a bit recurring, and extremely verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's likewise a strange, repetitive hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

There are lots 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 informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, given that rotating from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The firm uses its own AI tools to create them, based upon an open source big language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in any person's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, created by AI, and designed "entirely to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the item is planned as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He intends to expand his range, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human consumers.

It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, definitely in some parts, 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 produce similar material based upon it.

"We ought to be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we really 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 posts, this is pictures. It's works of art. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to discover 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 because it was not their work and they had not granted 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 extremely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for creative functions should be prohibited, however I do think that generative AI for these functions that is trained on people's work without authorization must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really effective however let's construct it fairly and fairly."

OpenAI states Chinese competitors using its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

AI shakes market and dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have actually picked to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have decided to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use developers' material on the internet to help develop their models, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "insanity".

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 changing copyright law and ruining the livelihoods of the nation's creatives," he argues.

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

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of joy," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The federal government is undermining one of its finest carrying out markets on the unclear pledge of development."

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

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide data library containing public data from a wide variety of sources will also be offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules 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 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 released.

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

This comes as a number of lawsuits against AI companies, and ai particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been gotten by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

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

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of factors which can make up reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it collects training data and whether it ought to be paying for it.

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

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for pyra-handheld.com a portion of the cost of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's present supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I really desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weakness in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and macphersonwiki.mywikis.wiki it can be rather difficult to check out in parts since it's so long-winded.

But offered how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm not sure for how long I can remain confident that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the most significant advancements in international technology, with analysis from BBC reporters worldwide.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.