For Christmas I received a fascinating present from a pal - my very own “best-selling” book.

“Tech-Splaining for Dummies” (great title) bears my name and my picture on its cover, and it has radiant reviews.

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a few basic triggers about me provided by my good friend Janet.

It’s an intriguing read, and extremely funny in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of composing, however it’s also a bit repeated, and very verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet’s prompts in looking at information about me.

Several sentences start “as a leading technology journalist …” - cringe - which could have been scraped from an online bio.

There’s also a strange, repetitive hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no pets). And there’s a metaphor on practically 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 told me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, since pivoting from compiling 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 large language design.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone developing one in anyone’s name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is imaginary, produced by AI, and developed “entirely to bring humour and delight”.

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a “personalised gag gift”, and the books do not get offered even more.

He wants to expand his variety, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It’s developed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - selling AI-generated items to human customers.

It’s likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you compose 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 similar to me.

Musicians, authors, artists and annunciogratis.net stars worldwide have 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 talking about data here, we in fact imply human developers’ life works,” states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, [users.atw.hu](http://users.atw.hu/samp-info-forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=dcb47374dcc28fd46dcb7711c6f9b4cd&action=profile