How an AI-written book shows why the tech ‘terrifies’ creatives
Full article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp8k5gezykyo
For Christmas I received an interesting gift from a friend – my very own “best-selling” book.
“Tech-Splaining for Dummies” (great title) bears my name and my photo on its cover, and it has glowing reviews.
Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a few simple prompts about me supplied by my friend Janet.
It’s an interesting read, and very funny in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.
It mimics my chatty style of writing, but it’s also a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet’s prompts in collating data about me.
Several sentences begin “as a leading technology journalist…” – cringe – which could have been scraped from an online bio.
There’s also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no pets). And there’s a metaphor on almost every page – some more random than others.
There are dozens of companies online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.
When I contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, since 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 on an open source large language model.