For Christmas I received a fascinating gift from a pal - my extremely own "best-selling" book.
"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (excellent title) bears my name and my photo on its cover, and it has glowing reviews.
Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a couple of easy triggers about me supplied by my friend Janet.
It's an intriguing read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders rather a lot, and is someplace between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.
It simulates my chatty design of composing, however it's also a bit repeated, and extremely verbose. It may have exceeded Janet's prompts in collecting data about me.
Several sentences begin "as a leading technology journalist ..." - cringe - which might have been scraped from an online bio.
There's also a mystical, 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 writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.
When I called the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had offered 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 expenses ₤ 26. The company utilizes its own AI tools to create them, based upon an open source big language model.
I'm not asking you to buy my book. Actually you can't - just Janet, who produced it, utahsyardsale.com can buy any additional copies.
There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in anybody's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, created by AI, and developed "solely to bring humour and happiness".
Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is meant as a "customised gag present", and orcz.com the books do not get sold even more.
He intends to widen his range, producing different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of customer AI - offering AI-generated products to human consumers.
It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to generate, [users.atw.hu](http://users.atw.hu/samp-info-forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=3cf0f5c485858dfbbee8002639f54764&action=profile
1
How an AI written Book Shows why the Tech 'Frightens' Creatives
leandroconsidi edited this page 3 months ago