For Christmas I got an intriguing present from a pal - my very own "best-selling" book.

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

Yet it was entirely composed by AI, with a few simple triggers about me provided by my buddy Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty design of composing, but it's also a bit recurring, and drapia.org really verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collecting information about me.

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

There's also a strange, repetitive hallucination in the type of my cat (I have no animals). And systemcheck-wiki.de there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of business online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, considering that 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 create them, based on an open source large language model.

I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - only Janet, who produced it, [forum.batman.gainedge.org](https://forum.batman.gainedge.org/index.php?action=profile