What is Barack Obama Book? It’s not a book, exactly. It’s an SEO ploy by a shadowy company that has scores of $2.99 knockoffs ready to be downloaded. But it’s also not not a book, in the sense that it is words on pages, bound by covers or delivered to your Kindle. I don’t think Barack Obama Book was written by a human being, but I do think the A.I. that excreted it made some decent points about Barack Obama. University Press has churned out 55 books since February 2019, and I like to imagine the hardworking A.I. behind these titles holed up in a hotel room somewhere, chain-smoking, downing coffee, and furiously digesting every single extant fact about, say, Queen Elizabeth. Then the A.I. compacts all that information into a small, dense slab of readable prose and sends it out into the world. “To knowledge!” University Press toasts at night, watching the royalties flood in. Sometimes it invites over friends like Birthday Song, who performs 100s of versions of the birthday song personalized for individual names on Spotify, or Videogyan, who creates iterative animations of babies doing ordinary tasks and has nearly 10M YouTube subscribers. Perhaps a bit sloshed, University Press lectures its friends long into the evening: “Ultimately,” it intones, “Barack Obama is just a human being with considerable charisma and charm who used his abilities to help him become President of the United States.” Its friends raise their glasses. “Happy Birthday Barack,” sings Birthday Song.

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