The rapid proliferation of AI in our lives introduces recent challenges around authorship, authenticity, and ethics in work and art. However it also offers a very human problem in narrative: How can we make of those machines, not only use them? And the way do the words we decide and stories we tell about technology affect the role we allow it to tackle (and even take over) in our creative lives? Each Vara’s book and , a set of essays on the history of art and automation by the music critic David Hajdu, explore how humans have historically and personally wrestled with the ways during which machines relate to our own bodies, brains, and creativity. At the identical time, , a brand new book by a neurologist, Pria Anand, reminds us that our own inner workings will not be really easy to copy.
is an odd artifact. Part memoir, part critical evaluation, and part AI-assisted creative experimentation, Vara’s essays trace her time as a tech reporter after which novelist within the San Francisco Bay Area alongside the history of the industry she watched grow up. Tech was all the time close enough to the touch: One college friend was an early Google worker, and when Vara began reporting on Facebook (now Meta), she and Mark Zuckerberg became “friends” on his platform. In 2007, she published a scoop that the corporate was planning to introduce ad targeting based on users’ personal information—the primary shot fired within the long, gnarly data war to return. In her essay “Stealing Great Ideas,” she talks about turning down a job reporting on Apple to go to graduate school for fiction. There, she wrote a novel a couple of tech founder, which was later published as . Vara points out that in some ways on the time, her art was “inextricable from the resources [she] used to create it”—products like Google Docs, a MacBook, an iPhone. But these pre-AI resources were tools, plain and easy. What got here next was different.
Interspersed with Vara’s essays are chapters of back-and-forths between the creator and ChatGPT concerning the book itself, where the bot serves as editor at Vara’s prompting. ChatGPT obligingly summarizes and critiques her writing in a corporate-shaded tone that’s now familiar to any knowledge employee. “If there’s a spot for disagreement,” it offers concerning the first few chapters on tech firms, “it could be within the balance of those narratives. Some might argue that the advantages—resembling job creation, innovation in various sectors like AI and logistics, and contributions to the worldwide economy—can outweigh the negatives.”
Vauhini Vara
PANTHEON, 2025
Vara notices that ChatGPT writes “we” and “our” in these responses, pulling it into the human story, not the tech one: “Earlier you mentioned ‘ access to information’ and ‘ collective experiences and understandings.’” When she asks what the rhetorical purpose of that selection is, ChatGPT responds with a numbered list of advantages including “inclusivity and solidarity” and “neutrality and objectivity.” It adds that “using the first-person plural helps to border the discussion when it comes to shared human experiences and collective challenges.” Does the bot consider it’s human? Or not less than, do the humans who made it want other humans to consider it does? “Can corporations use these [rhetorical] tools of their products too, to subtly make people discover with, and never in opposition to, them?” Vara asks. ChatGPT replies, “Absolutely.”
Vara has concerns concerning the words she’s used as well. In “Thank You for Your Vital Work,” she worries concerning the impact of “Ghosts,” which went viral after it was first published. Had her writing helped corporations hide the truth of AI behind a velvet curtain? She’d meant to supply a nuanced “provocation,” exploring how uncanny generative AI might be. But as a substitute, she’d produced something beautiful enough to resonate as an ad for its creative potential. Even Vara herself felt fooled. She particularly loved one passage the bot wrote, about Vara and her sister as kids holding hands on a protracted drive. But she couldn’t imagine either of them being so sentimental. What Vara had elicited from the machine, she realized, was “wish success,” not a haunting.
The rapid proliferation of AI in our lives introduces recent challenges around authorship, authenticity, and ethics in work and art. How can we make of those machines, not only use them?
The machine wasn’t the one thing crouching behind that too-good-to-be-true curtain. The GPT models and others are trained through human labor, in sometimes exploitative conditions. And far of the training data was the creative work of human writers before her. “I’d conjured artificial language about grief through the extraction of real human beings’ language about grief,” she writes. The creative ghosts within the model were product of code, yes, but additionally, ultimately, product of people. Perhaps Vara’s essay helped cover up that truth too.
Within the book’s final essay, Vara offers a mirror image of those AI call-and-response exchanges as an antidote. After sending out an anonymous survey to women of varied ages, she presents the replies to every query, one after the opposite. “Describe something that doesn’t exist,” she prompts, and the ladies respond: “God.” “God.” “God.” “Perfection.” “My job. (Lost it.)” Real people contradict one another, joke, yell, mourn, and reminisce. As a substitute of a single authoritative voice—an editor, or an organization’s limited style guide—Vara gives us the complete gasping crowd of human creativity. “What’s it wish to be alive?” Vara asks the group. “It depends,” one woman answers.
