For Christmas I got an interesting gift from a buddy - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a couple of simple triggers about me provided by my friend Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty design of composing, bbarlock.com but it's also a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It might have surpassed Janet's triggers in looking at information 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, repetitive hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

There are lots of companies online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, given that rotating from putting together 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 produce 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 produced it, can order any more copies.

There is presently no barrier to anybody producing one in anyone's name, pipewiki.org including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and delight".

Legally, wiki.dulovic.tech the copyright comes from the company, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is meant as a "customised gag gift", and dokuwiki.stream the books do not get offered even more.

He wishes to broaden his variety, generating various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human consumers.

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 produce, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound similar to me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar material based upon it.

"We should be clear, when we are discussing information here, we in fact indicate human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI firms to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is photos. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The entire point of AI training is to learn how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists 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 developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for imaginative purposes ought to be banned, but I do believe that generative AI for these functions that is trained on individuals's work without approval must be banned," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be extremely effective however let's develop it ethically and fairly."

OpenAI says 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 - consisting of the BBC - have actually chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have decided to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use developers' material on the web to assist establish 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, journalists and artists.

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and ruining the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is likewise highly versus getting rid of 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 an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening among its best carrying out markets on the unclear guarantee of growth."

A government spokesperson said: "No move will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to assist them license their material, access to top quality product to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a nationwide information library containing public data from a wide variety of sources will likewise 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 aimed to improve the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share information of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

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

This comes as a variety of lawsuits against AI firms, coastalplainplants.org and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their consent, 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 number of factors which can make up fair use - it's not a straight-forward meaning. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and whether it must be spending for it.

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

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

When it comes to me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I really 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 plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But provided how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm unsure the length of time I can stay confident that my considerably slower human writing and editing abilities, are much better.

Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the most significant advancements in international technology, with analysis from BBC reporters around the world.

Outside the UK? Register here.