For Christmas I got a fascinating gift from a good friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (fantastic title) bears my name and my picture on its cover, and shiapedia.1god.org it has glowing reviews.

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a few basic prompts about me supplied by my friend Janet.

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

It imitates my chatty style of composing, but it's likewise a bit repeated, and very verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's triggers in looking at data about me.

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

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

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

When I called the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, mainly in the US, because 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 firm utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source big language design.

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

There is currently no barrier to anybody one in anybody's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, developed by AI, and designed "entirely to bring humour and pleasure".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is planned as a "customised gag gift", and the books do not get sold further.

He wishes to expand his variety, generating different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI-generated items to human clients.

It's likewise a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

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

"We must be clear, when we are talking about data here, we in fact imply human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, [users.atw.hu](http://users.atw.hu/samp-info-forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=795ebe555926e6655f94f0b9f46b777e&action=profile