Anne Helen Petersen calls Vauhini Vara’s ´Searches´ the most exhilarating and insightful book she’s read this year, praising its capacity to reshape readers’ understanding of artificial intelligence, self-performance, and the broader internet. The book, stemming partially from Vara’s viral essay ´Ghosts´, dives into the author’s use of Generative Pre-trained Transformers to process grief and write about her late sister when personal words failed her. The resulting hybrid work is both unsettling and beautiful, prompting questions about authorship, originality, and the boundaries between human and machine-generated text.
In her discussion with Vara, Petersen highlights how ´Searches´ uses the lens of seeking—whether for knowledge, self, or fulfillment online—as a central theme. Vara examines the ways big technology firms both satisfy and exploit the universal human curiosity, exploring how our search for answers through platforms and commerce (such as Amazon) embroils us in contradictions and ethical dilemmas. Vara integrates personal experiences, such as her struggle to abstain from Amazon despite knowing its downsides, to show how technology frequently reshapes social behaviors and identities, often making users complicit in systems they wish to resist.
The book also innovatively incorporates interactions with artificial intelligence models, frequently inserting chat summaries of Vara’s text that flatten or misrepresent her arguments. This technique reveals artificial intelligence’s narrative limitations, undermining the idea that these models can genuinely collaborate with human creators. Vara’s experiments with language, like writing a chapter in Spanish and analyzing its translation back into English, further probe the limits of machine-mediated communication and the nuances lost or altered across languages. Ultimately, she interrogates tech industry rhetoric that positions artificial intelligence as a creative ´collaborator´, arguing this collaboration is illusory: these systems, built for corporate interests, cannot share in true intellectual or creative partnership. ´Searches´ compels readers to reconsider the meanings of collaboration, creation, and human agency in the digital era.
