For Christmas I received an intriguing present from a friend - my extremely own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was completely written by AI, with a couple of basic triggers about me supplied by my good friend Janet.

It's a fascinating 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 mimics my chatty style of composing, but it's likewise a bit repetitive, and extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in collating data about me.

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

There's likewise a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on almost every page - some more random than others.

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

When I called the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, since pivoting from assembling 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 generate them, [forum.batman.gainedge.org](https://forum.batman.gainedge.org/index.php?action=profile