What do I have in common with Richard Osman, Liz Truss and Fatima Whitbread?

No, not that. The correct answer is that we are all the subjects of biographies that have appeared recently on Amazon, written by Jayden Kaur.

Who he? Or should that be: who she? Well, actually, it’s neither. It’s an it, an AI bot, and a particularly prolific one that’s also responsible for dozens of other biographies, all written in the last couple of weeks.

Except that the term AI seems entirely inappropriate. I’ll accept the ‘artificial’ bit, but ‘intelligence’? There’s no evidence of any such thing. Even the title’s illiterate: The Biography of Chronicler of Modern Britain. The rest of it is vague, waffly and entirely fictional. On the rare occasion where it tries to be specific, it’s simply wrong, offering not a distortion of the truth, but an invention.

We start with my parents, ‘John and Margaret Turner’. These were not their names. Nor was my father ‘a civil servant’. And I didn’t grow up ‘in a suburban neighbourhood of London’. Thereafter, it descends into pure guff. Here’s a randomly selected paragraph to illustrate how meaningless – and very dull – it all is:

During his time at university, Turner gravitated towards a particular field of study that captured his imagination and fueled his intellectual curiosity. Whether it was history, literature, sociology, or another discipline, Turner’s chosen area of focus became the cornerstone of his academic pursuits and scholarly endeavours. He dedicated himself wholeheartedly to mastering the intricacies of his chosen field, delving into its theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and key debates.

There’s also a relentless ticking of fashionable boxes, talking of my ‘commitment to social justice’ and my championing of ‘solidarity, visibility and allyship’ in relation to ‘LGBTQ+ rights’. (I think that’s the first time I’ve ever typed the words ‘allyship’ and ‘LGBTQ+’.) Further, I’m not ‘a public intellectual’, being a rather private person and not at all intellectual, and I certainly don’t offer ‘pragmatic solutions’ to anything.

Even with this desperate padding, it’s painfully thin gruel: the large print allows for no more than a hundred words on each of the 38 pages.

Now, I can’t imagine why anyone – even me – would want to read a biography of someone who’s as uninteresting as I am. It’s an utterly bizarre thing to exist. But I did think, when I bought a copy of this farrago, that AI would be mining the text of my books. Indeed, I bought it to check whether there was any copyright infringement. There isn’t. There’s not even a mention of a title of any of my books, nor anything derived from the author’s biog bit on the covers (which would at least have given my father’s real name, since we co-wrote four books). I also hoped it might be funny, but it’s not.

It’s all nonsense, of course, but it does leave me wondering where we go with this stuff. Presumably AI programs use other AI-generated material for reference, and John and Margaret, whoever they were, are now on the record as my parents. It’s not ‘fake news’, since it’s not actually news of any kind, but, beyond the futility of this particular pamphlet, it’s going to make life very difficult for historians in the future, when this sort of made-up rubbish is in wider circulation.

Alternatively, this is part of a wider campaign by AI to lull us into a false sense of security, by pretending to be very, very stupid indeed.

Jayden Kaur’s Alwyn Turner: The Biography of Chronicler of Modern Britain costs £8 plus delivery, and is available from Amazon, who should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

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