For Christmas I got an intriguing gift from a friend - my really own "very popular" book.
"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (terrific title) bears my name and my photo on its cover, and it has glowing reviews.
Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a few easy prompts about me supplied by my friend Janet.
It's a fascinating read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, higgledy-piggledy.xyz and is someplace in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.
It simulates my chatty style of writing, however it's also a bit repeated, and orcz.com really verbose. It may have surpassed Janet's prompts in collecting information about me.
Several sentences begin "as a leading technology reporter ..." - cringe - which could have been scraped from an online bio.
There's also a strange, repeated hallucination in the form of my feline (I have no animals). And 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 called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, given that pivoting from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.
A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs ₤ 26. The firm uses its own AI tools to generate them, based upon an open source big language design.
I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - only Janet, who created it, can buy any additional copies.
There is currently no barrier to anyone developing one in anybody's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, developed by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and delight".
Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is intended as a "personalised gag gift", and the books do not get sold even more.
He wants to broaden his range, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and suvenir51.ru possibly providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI - selling AI-generated products to human consumers.
It's likewise a bit frightening if, like me, you write for a living. Not least since it most likely took less than a minute to create, and it does, definitely in some parts, sound simply like me.
Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then produce similar content based upon it.
"We need to be clear, when we are talking about information here, we in fact mean human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, demo.qkseo.in founder of Fairly Trained, [users.atw.hu](http://users.atw.hu/samp-info-forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=795ebe555926e6655f94f0b9f46b777e&action=profile
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How an AI written Book Shows why the Tech 'Terrifies' Creatives
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