Will writers be forced to collaborate with AI to remain relevant in the future? Pulitzer Prize finalist Vauhini Vara won’t necessarily give you an answer to this question in her latest book, the essay collection Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, which delves into our relationship with technology in general and AI in particular, but it may help you find your own conclusion. The form of this book seems, on its face, to be a collaboration with the large language models that have taken the world by storm, but it soon reveals itself as an interrogation. Blending memoir, reporting, and experimental writing—with Google searches, Amazon reviews, and AI-generated text—Vara deftly explores both the possibilities and the costs of technological progress.
We spoke about the book and what it means to be human in an era where our words, thoughts, and identities are constantly mediated by algorithms and shaped by technology that is in turn shaped by us.
Denise S. Robbins:
Did you ask ChatGPT for advice on how to prepare for interviews about Searches?
Vauhini Vara:
I did not, but that’s a good question.
Denise S. Robbins:
Well, I was inspired by your book, so I did ask ChatGPT what should be the first question I ask you, and it said, “Your book explores deeply personal experiences alongside the broader implications of AI and technology. What was the moment or experience that made you realize this was a book you needed to write?” My question is, first, what do you think of that question?
Vauhini Vara:
It’s not bad. When you said you asked ChatGPT about questions I wondered, what kind of crap is it going to come up with? But I don’t think it’s a bad question. What do you think?
Denise S. Robbins:
I think it didn’t need to give a whole summary in the beginning.
Vauhini Vara:
That’s true. I know what my book is about.
Denise S. Robbins:
But it’s an okay question at the end: Was there a moment or experience that made you realize you wanted to write this book? So, was there?
Vauhini Vara:
In 2019, I wrote this essay made up of my Google searches, and it was published in The New York Times Opinion section. That was the first time I had published an essay that used found material of my own experiences with the internet as the text for the essay. And it made me realize that, as human beings living in the world, whether we’re writers or not, we are putting text out there all the time, and sometimes that text is very revealing about ourselves. Somewhat unrelatedly, about a year later, I got access to an early OpenAI model that generated text, a predecessor to the models underlying ChatGPT, and used that to write an essay as a kind of duet between myself and this language model, which in some ways felt to me like it was of a piece with that previous essay. I ended up coming up with this book of experimental essays engaging with technology.
Denise S. Robbins:
Did you worry about writing a book about an industry that’s changing all the time?
Vauhini Vara:
No. The book’s shelf life is not really something that I was concerned with. I don’t think it’s something I think about with any book, which maybe is funny to say because I’m a journalist too. And as a journalist I’m really concerned with the timeliness of something I write. I want it to speak to the moment. But books are inherently different beasts; ideally they’re capturing something that has broader resonance beyond that moment in time. I don’t know if that’s any more or less true with respect to writing about the technology products we use in 2025 than it was about writing about World War II or the Spanish Civil War.
Denise S. Robbins:
More of an archive that also catalogs human experiences that will never change.
Vauhini Vara:
Yeah.
Denise S. Robbins:
You have a lot of personal memoir narrative in here as well. Did that make you nervous?
Vauhini Vara:
I don’t think of this book as being a particularly comprehensive book about my own life. I think of it as a book about technology in which I use my own experiences with technology specifically to explore broader and more universal questions about our relationship with it.
Denise S. Robbins:
You’ve also written a short story collection that felt very personal in a different way.
Vauhini Vara:
All my books are personal in different ways. We sometimes say that the difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction is made up and nonfiction is true. And the way I like to reframe it to my students is that the difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction doesn’t claim to be true, whereas nonfiction claims to be true. So I could write a story that is entirely autobiographical, but call it a story. Or I could claim that it’s true and therefore call it nonfiction. I think those boundaries can be really porous.
Denise S. Robbins:
There’s also your novel, The Immortal King Rao, where AI is significant to the plot. Do you consider Searches an extension of that novel or vice versa?
Vauhini Vara:
They each stand alone, but they’re in conversation with each other. In my novel, written in the 2010s, I could see where our relationship with Big Tech was at that point. In order to comment on that, I chose to imagine what the world might look like in the future if the power and wealth of these big technology companies continued to grow. That book was published in 2022. This book is being published in 2025. And a lot has changed even in those three years. I think in this book, we’ve gotten closer to a version of the imagined future that I laid out in my novel. I was able to continue it nonfictionally in this book in a more satisfying way. Like the novel, Searches is of course also about the growing wealth and power of big technology companies. The other thing that both books contend with is our complicity, the complicity of users of these products in the rise of these companies.
Denise S. Robbins:
You write about language a lot in this book as well. Do you think that technology and language are inherently intertwined?
Vauhini Vara:
I do. What made human beings uniquely capable of building what we call “technologies”—and I’m defining that really broadly—is our ability to communicate at a high level. And our ability to communicate at a high level relies on language. So to that extent, the two are very intertwined. Beyond that, there are some technologies that are more intertwined with language than others, of course, such as the Internet technologies that require the use of text to engage with them.
Denise S. Robbins:
You also wrote a lot about the challenge of language and translation. Do you worry about the limitations of language to reflect experience itself?
Vauhini Vara:
Language is the tool we have available to us to try to understand one another. It’s an imperfect tool, but every tool is imperfect. As I write in the book, the effort is the point.
Denise S. Robbins:
In your book, you ask ChatGPT to write an epilogue for the book (which happens before the final two chapters). I thought it was lovely, particularly a quote from Sam Altman that was very fake: “AI can give us the tools to explore our humanity in ways we never imagined. It’s up to us to use them wisely.” Were you moved by anything ChatGPT wrote, and how do you feel about the fact that other people might enjoy the writing in those sections not written by you?
Vauhini Vara:
I hesitate to say what my reading of my own work is, including the parts of the book I didn’t write myself. I want readers to have their own interpretations. In this instance, your interpretation was different from mine, but I think that’s interesting and worthwhile. I don’t think your reading is wrong and mine is right or vice versa.
In the essay “Ghosts”, I worked with GPT-3 to write an essay about my sister. It says, while my sister and I are sitting at a stop light, that my sister takes my hand and holds it. “This is the hand she held: the hand I write with, the hand I am writing this with.” To me, those were the best lines of that essay. But, as I write in the book, those lines weren’t actually true to my experience. My sister and I didn’t typically sit at stoplights holding hands. I couldn’t have written a line like that because it literally didn’t occur and would never have occurred. So even though it moved me as a reader, it wasn’t satisfying to me as a writer because it wasn’t true. I had to go back to the page and write the truth.
Denise S. Robbins:
Is AI going to continue to be a topic in your writing, either in future novels or nonfiction books, or are you done writing about it forever?
Vauhini Vara:
I don’t know. When I went to graduate school in 2008, after having worked as a technology reporter, I thought I was going to learn about creative writing and write about things having nothing to do with technology. Then I surprised myself by writing a whole novel about Big Tech. So I always hesitate to forecast what I think might happen in my own writing future, because I’m sure I’ll get it wrong.
NONFICTION
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
By Vauhini Vara
Pantheon
Published on April 8, 2025
