For Christmas I got a fascinating gift from a friend - my really own "very popular" book.

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

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a few easy triggers about me supplied by my buddy Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and really funny in parts. But it also meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of writing, but it's likewise a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's also a mystical, repeated hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on practically 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 contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised 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 expenses ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to produce 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 produced it, can order any more copies.

There is presently no barrier to anyone creating one in any person's name, consisting of stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, produced by AI, [rocksoff.org](https://rocksoff.org/foroes/index.php?action=profile