For Christmas I got a fascinating present from a pal - my very own “very popular” book.

“Tech-Splaining for Dummies” (great title) bears my name and my picture on its cover, and it has radiant reviews.

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a couple of easy triggers about me supplied by my pal Janet.

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

It simulates my chatty style of composing, however it’s likewise a bit repetitive, bphomesteading.com and very verbose. It might have exceeded Janet’s prompts in collecting data 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 family pets). And there’s a metaphor on almost 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 called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, tandme.co.uk because 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 utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source large language design.

I’m not asking you to buy my book. Actually you can’t - only Janet, who created it, can buy any further copies.

There is currently no barrier to anybody producing one in any person’s name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, developed by AI, and created “solely to bring humour and happiness”.

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is planned as a “customised gag gift”, [forum.batman.gainedge.org](https://forum.batman.gainedge.org/index.php?action=profile