For Christmas I got an interesting gift from a friend - my really own "best-selling" book.

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

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

It's an intriguing read, and uproarious in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It imitates my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit recurring, and very verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's triggers in looking at data about me.

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

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

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

When I got in touch with the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had offered around 150,000 personalised books, mainly 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 utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based on an open source big language model.

I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - only Janet, who developed it, can order any further copies.

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in anyone's name, including stars - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around content. Each book includes a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, created by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

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