For Christmas I received an interesting present from a buddy - my very own "very popular" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent title) bears my name and my image on its cover, and it has glowing reviews.

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

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

It imitates my chatty design of writing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It might have exceeded Janet's triggers in collating data about me.

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

There's also a strange, repeated hallucination in the type of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

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

When I got in touch with the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, since 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 upon an open source big language model.

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

There is presently no barrier to anyone creating one in anybody's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, created by AI, [forum.batman.gainedge.org](https://forum.batman.gainedge.org/index.php?action=profile