Searches: Selfhood in the digital age – A chat with ChatGPT
In the year 2025, using ChatGPT to write about ChatGPT has already become a cliche. But Vauhini Vara may have been the first. In 2020, having previously shadowed Open AI CEO Sam Altman for a tech profile, Vara asked him if she could try out the new text generator they were then testing: GPT-3.
Using this Vara wrote Ghosts, an essay that alternates between text written herself and by the LLM. The subject? The only one she could never find words for: her sister’s death from cancer. When the essay went viral, Vara was somewhat conflicted, unsure if she really wanted to be a collaborator with such technology.
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, is a book that includes Vara’s viral essay within a collection of other experimental texts, which either use or are inspired by tech. Some are her conversations with ChatGPT about the book itself. One is just her Google search history, which, like the cetology chapters in Moby Dick, is more interesting in point than it is to actually read.
Neither a tech evangelist nor pure adversary, Vara is interesting for her contradictions. She criticises the mechanisms behind much of Big Tech while also giving concessions. She writes how Google CEO Sundar Pichai, for example, is not given enough credit for his point that people actually retain control over many aspects of how their information is collected and used by the company.
By far Vara’s bravest admission in Searches, however, in method and statement, is that AI can actually produce good prose. “After Ghosts came out, some readers told me it had persuaded them that computers wouldn’t replace us anytime soon, arguing that the lines I’d written were much better than AI-generated ones… The complicating factor, for me, was that I disagreed. In my opinion, GPT-3 had produced the best lines in Ghosts.”
Vara pinpoints a particular line written by the AI in which her sister holds her hand, something she admits was a complete invention. “My sister and I were never so sentimental… It was a kind of wish fulfilment.” In this admission, Vara reminds us that any significance produced by AI is ultimately human.