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.
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