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

“Tech-Splaining for Dummies” (excellent title) bears my name and my photo on its cover, and it has radiant evaluations.

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a couple of easy prompts about me provided by my buddy Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of writing, but it’s likewise a bit repetitive, and forums.cgb.designknights.com very verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet’s triggers in collecting information about me.

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

There’s also a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the kind 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 services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, considering that rotating 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 on an open source big language model.

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

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in anybody’s name, consisting of celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, produced by AI, and created “solely to bring humour and happiness”.

Legally, the copyright belongs to the company, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a “customised gag gift”, and the books do not get sold even more.

He wishes to broaden his range, creating various categories such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It’s designed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI-generated goods to human consumers.

It’s likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for [forum.batman.gainedge.org](https://forum.batman.gainedge.org/index.php?action=profile