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

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a few basic triggers about me supplied by my pal Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of composing, however it's likewise a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's prompts in collecting data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the kind 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 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 offered around 150,000 personalised books, primarily in the US, since rotating from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to generate them, based on an open source big language model.

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

There is currently 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 fictional, developed by AI, and developed "exclusively to bring humour and pleasure".

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

He wants to expand his variety, generating different genres such as sci-fi, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human customers.

It's also a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it most likely 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 revealed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce similar content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are discussing data here, we actually suggest 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 articles, this is photos. 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 tune including AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists 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 developer attempting to nominate it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still hugely popular.

"I do not think making use of generative AI for creative functions should be banned, however I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without consent should be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be really effective but let's construct it morally and relatively."

OpenAI states Chinese rivals using its work for 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 - including the BBC - have actually picked to block AI designers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to work together - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for example.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use developers' material on the internet to help develop their models, 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, reporters and artists.

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

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

"Creative industries are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a lot of happiness," says the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening among its best carrying out industries on the vague promise of development."

A government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made until we are definitely positive we have a practical plan that delivers each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to help them license their content, access to top quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a nationwide data library consisting of public data from a large range of sources will also be provided to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines 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 boost the security of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector required to share details of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are launched.

But this has now been by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a number of suits against AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everybody from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the web without their permission, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. 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 adequate to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the previous week. It ended up being one of the most downloaded totally free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a portion of the rate of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the existing weakness in generative AI tools for larger jobs. It has plenty of mistakes and hallucinations, and it can be rather difficult to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

But offered how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm uncertain the length of time I can stay positive that my substantially slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

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

Outside the UK? Register here.